The pocket wizards that I've had on order for some time finally arrived the other day and here they are, taken in natural light through an open door, sitting on a white piece of normal paper.All they do for me at the moment is get rid of the cord which isn't that big a deal when shooting in close proximity to the subject or when the camera is on a tripod. But it will be nice to be shed of the cord.
Even though I don't have a TTL flash, which means I can't take full advantage of these puppies, the small size and the ability to mount the transmitter and receiver directly to the camera or flash is a great plus and is probably what sold me.
I set up my Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe softbox today to take some shots of the only model I could find available, me. I did have some trouble getting the TT5 set up because the shoe is offset a bit and it was just a bit difficult to get everything to work. I'll have to make some kind of mods to the Ezybox system to facilitate this but I still managed to get it working okay.
So, here is one of the shots I took. I bought this straw fedora for $10 a couple of weeks ago solely because I wanted to take some pics of me wearing it. I really wanted some sunglasses to wear as well but couldn't find any cheap ones that I liked. (I normally wear glasses so don't have any sunglasses.
It took me awhile to get the lighting the way I liked and most of the shots were opposite to this one. I changed up just for a few with the flash on camera left. One Vivitar flash through a Stofen Omnibounce and then through the Ezybox on Camera left. On Camera right I had a 30" reflector propped up on a highchair to bounce some light onto the left side of my face.
The background was a wrinkled white sheet and I had another Vivitar flash attached to a slave firing behind it. This blew out most of the wrinkles and the couple remaining were dealt with in Photoshop. A bit of adjustment was done in Camera Raw and a bit of softening of my old skin in Photoshop and I cropped it to a square format.
The PocketWizards worked flawlessly. I thought I had a problem towards the end of my shoot when the odd time the flash wouldn't fire but then I discovered that the batteries were pretty much done in the flash.
Other Specs: Canon 30D, 70-200 lens @ 70mm, 1/250 @ f6.3, ISO 100, Manual mode.
I would like to see what solution you come up with for mounting the TT5 on the Ezybox. I'm having trouble myself (just tried it today).
ReplyDeleteJared
I haven't really had another look at it since this post, too busy I guess. If I recall correctly I had to leave the securing bolt off and just let everything sit there kind of jammed in. I did get it to work but it isn't ideal for sure. If I figure something out when I get a chance to look at it again, I'll try and post something again.
ReplyDeleteIf you come up with something, let me know. You can email me. The link is on my profile page.
And thanks. Didn't know that anyone really looked at this blog since I'm so inconsistent with it. :)