A new subject (still a doggy).

Friends let me do a photoshoot of their dog yesterday. It gave me a chance to put some of my new toys to the test. I had just picked up a Lastolite Hilite off ebay for white background shots, and have also aquired a Sekonic light meter. The latter takes all the guesswork/trial and error out of setting up the lighting ratios, and of course using it makes me feel like a real pro !!!

The dark backgrounds were lit with a softbox as key, and a white reflective brolly as fill. White background was lit with the umbrella on its own, one stop less than the hilite.

Love the last one in particular, and seems nicer on a white backdrop

Should be proud of these. Good shooting

The 2nd one has a great humour to it! Good to see you enjoying the new kit as well Peter. A flash meter, that does sound very pro!

The second one reminds me of Mutley from a cartoon series I watched as a kid.

The flash meter is the basic Sekonic which can do ambient light as well. Thing I hadn't bargained on was that it means i have to fire the Pentax flashes in manual mode set on the units themselves, and cannot use the manual controls remotely from the Cactus V6II TX trigger. This is because for the Cactus TX unit to set the output levels the Pentax flashes need to be in P-TTL mode. In such mode they fire a pre-flash which the Sekonic meter picks up instead of the main flash. So I now have the Cactus triggers working just as before but I have to set the flashes to M and adjust each output on the flash itself.

In practice this is not a problem as it is easy to set up the individual flashes to produce the output I want from each, then take a final meter reading from them all which is my working aperture, and once set , it is set. I find it is giving me better exposure than checking the histogram.

ADORABLE!

Oh these are very lovely! Beautiful dog!
And also, the lighting works really well for you. Might have to look into a Lastolite Hilite myself!

She is a lovely dog. My friends, the owners have worked wonders with her. A nervous wreck when they rescued her she is now a happy bouncy lady.

The hilite is very new to me, this was the first time I had used it. I think it worked very well with the monochromatic subject. The advantage is even background lighting without shadows falling from the subject itself, but I guess it could cause a problem with low contrast if you have it set too bright.