Lee & Tash Low Key Portrait

Low Key Portrait



So Christmas has been and gone and this year santa was kind enough to bring me amongst other things a canon speedlight 580 ex ii with a sto-fen diffuser a light stand and a shoot through umbrella.

  

After a very brief look through the instruction manual and a look at my Canon EOS 7D menu system I managed to get the speedlight working without to much fuss. I worked out how to use it off camera using the 7ds built in wireless transmitter. I have to say that I did refer to the Magic Lantern Guide for the Canon EOS 7D to clarify some of the menu system options. This guide is just a must have for any owner as the manual is so informative and concise I don't regret that purchase at all.

All I needed now was some reluctant models so here enters my eldest son and his girlfriend who thought they were on there way out until I grabbed them for my maiden shoot.

  

A simple pose in my front room but with a fast shutter speed I managed to eliminate all the ambient light in the room so all the lighting in this shot is flash.

I attached the Sto-fen diffuser which was no easy thing the first few times as it just pushes on with a tight fit over the rubber moulding on the side of the speedlight.

Strobist info:-

• Canon speedlight 580 exii to camera high left at 1/8th power with sto-fen diffuser
• Aperture f6.3
• Shutter speed 1/250 sec
• Iso 100
• Lens Tamron AF 17-50mm F2.8 XR Di II LD Aspherical (IF) 

I then imported picture into Photoshop CS5 via Lightroom 3 and made very few adjustments I tweaked the background slightly to get it black I used Niksoft Silver Efex pro 2 to convert it to black and white used a few control points to lighten certain areas and darken others ,then used Niksoft sharpener pro 3 to sharpen image before adding a simple border and watermarking.

  

If you would like to comment on this image please view it HERE on my flickr photostream. Thanks for looking, look forward to reading your comments, more soon…..