Life’s not about cycling all the time. I have a friend who is into rowing. I wanted to take her portrait so I joined her training session a couple weeks ago on a sunny Saturday.
I arrived a bit late so I missed them as they got the boat out of the water but to make up for the missed shots, they asked me to take a group picture. It was pretty straightforward, nothing fancy. They lined up in the entrance of the boathouse and I started shooting. This was the output:
I liked it but it bothered me that the background is very dark and hence the rowing ladies weren’t in focus enough. So I decided to pop up a flash right behind them, that would light up the background a bit. I set the flash to 1/8th power and put a diffuser on top to make the light a bit more even. This was the result:
There were two things that I only realized once I got back to process the pictures: the legs of the light stand are visible in the background, I didn’t hide it properly. The other thing was that one of the girls blinked. Before taking the picture, I asked them to close their eyes and then open them on my command. They did so, but somehow one of them managed to close it anyhow.
After the team photo, I started to snap pictures of my friend, Andi. I was using a small Canon EX 580II flash with a Lumiquest Softbox to light her. We tried a few setups but I wasn’t entirely happy as I wanted to light the background with another strobe but forgot to bring along another Pocket Wizard, so the boats remained a bit darker than I wanted.
