At first I just played around with the different light modifiers without any real thought to how I was lighting the subject...I was mainly trying to see if I remembered how the pieces all went together and that everything still worked okay. The above image shows my two 430EX Speedlites with Stofen diffusers and my 580EX II with a white umbrella. The speedlites were all set to 1/8th power and the exposure settings were ISO 100, f/4.5 and 1/100.
The above image is a shot of my three softboxes...a Lastolite Ezybox Speed-Lite, a 16" Cheetah Q-Box with grid and a 24" Lastolite Ezybox. I had the flashes set to 1/16 power and the camera exposure settings were ISO 100, f/4.0 and 1/100. I wanted to see the spill control of the softboxes...and yep, they really do control the light spread pretty well, especially when a grid is used.
This images shows you how much light spill you get when you use umbrellas...that's when the light goes all over the place in a fairly uncontrolled manner. Some of the light from the flash will go through the white material to hit the subject, but some of the light also bounces back towards the flash and then bounces off the walls and ceiling. The flashes were set to 1/16 power and exposure settings were ISO 100, f/3.5 and 1/100.
This final image was taken with the flash bounced off the ceiling, which produces a very soft light since the ceiling provides a very large surface area to scatter the light from. It's a good way to illuminate a large area, but not a good choice if you're trying to do an intimate type shot. This was shot using my 580EX II with the CP-E4 battery pack, flash was set to 1/4 power and exposure settings were ISO 100, f/3.5 and 1/100.
Okay...I've had my fun just playing around with the strobist gear. Now it was time to start learning something about light and shadows. I'll continue that in the next blog entry.