Playing With Flash: Chickadee

I don't remember what exactly I was doing, but it caused me to remember a guy who photographs birds using his flashes. It occurred to me that I'm pretty much all set to give this a try myself, so I did. What you see below is my first attempt at shooting a bird using flash. I wanted to blacken out the background, but it didn't work out as well as I had hoped.

In order to shoot this, I had my camera and flashes on full manual. The slave flash (580EX) was set to full power and my master flash set to 1/128th, the lowest it can go. All I'm using my master flash for is triggering the slave. I set the shutter speed to 1/2000th of a second and the aperture as wide as I could go, which is f/5.6 with my Sigma 70-300mm lens.

Here's a list of things I plan on trying next:

• Block all the feeder ports on the feeder except the ones I want to shoot the birds from.
• Remove the other bird feeder from the back yard so they don't have an alternate feeder to eat from.
• Position myself better so the tree is in the background.
• Work out better exposure settings.

Playing With Light

Thanks, Zetson, for the extra push I needed to get a new entry up on my blog! Hopefully, this won't go collecting dust for nearly a whole month again for a while!

I currently have in my possession a 580EX flash to accompany my 580EX II as I contemplate buying it. I originally wanted to purchase a set of Elinchrom Skyports to get my flash off camera and I still may do that, but I really am enjoying the Canon wireless flash system. Some of the benefits to it are the e-TTL, which I'm not using much, and high-speed shutter sync, which I have used. It didn't take long to figure out how to control the 580EX as a slave to my 580EX II master.

The following is a result of my playing around with a toy my mom bought me for Christmas a few years ago. Yes, I'm 32 years old and yes, I still ask my mom for toys like this for Christmas! I thought it only fitting that I incorporate some Christmas lights in the photos of a Christmas present around Christmas time!

The lights in the background are supposed to be star shaped. Unfortunately, the star I cut out of a piece of foam craft paper didn't work out too well. I'll have to try again with card stock. If you want to know what I did, check out this link.

Have a Merry Christmas! And don't forget the Reason for the Season!