More Sea Creatures

[RSL]

With soft light

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Both are wonderful shots but no. 2 stands out for me for threedimensionality, detail, tonality.
And yes - I agree you need some velvet
I'd love to see that series going on.
Its beautiful black and white aesthetics, like from the old days.
Cheers
~Chris

[RSL]

Thanks, Chris. And David, to answer your now removed comment: On Wednesdays my wife takes our crippled neighbor lady out for shopping and lunch, which leaves me without a car and stranded in an area I've photographed to death. So I've been experimenting with speedlights and my wife's collection of beautiful shells. It's been almost fifty years since I was last into artificial light, but it's all coming back to me. Here's a shot of the community woodworkers' shop. They wanted pictures for a web site, so I shot every machine in this room, plus a bunch more in a second room next door. Then I switched to the rooms themselves. In this one I got the ambient light correct on the camera but there were a couple areas that were weren't bright enough, so I hid two speedlights and used radio triggers to trigger them. I've been having a ball re-learning this stuff.

[David Eckels]

Thanks, Russ. I later found the "Weston" threads and my questions then seemed silly so I removed the post. It is very interesting to watch you experimenting as you "relearn."

[RSL]

Thanks David. What's fascinating is how much things have changed. In the sixties you pinned down ambient light with a hand-held meter and used a guide number to figure out the flash. If you were wrong you didn't know it until you developed your film or got your transparencies back from Kodak, so if you were smart, when you were doing commercial work in a complicated situation you over-shot, which could get expensive. Nowadays, with digital, you can meter from the camera, set a shutter speed and aperture, make a shot to check ambient light, and adjust shutter speed if you were off. Then, once you've got ambient in your sights you can depend on i-TTL to control the flash. That's true even if a couple of your flashes are out of sight. You make a shot with flash and look at the LCD screen to see if everything is okay. If not, you dial the flashes down or up right from the camera and shoot again. You have a kind of control nobody could even conceive of in the sixties.

[Rajan Parrikar]

Marvellous, both images.

[wolfnowl]

Marvellous, both images.

Indeed!!