Wooot! First post ^_^

Pretty excited to be making my first post. I intend to start using this blog as an avenue for sharing some of the randomness that comes (and goes) in my life... but primarily it'll serve as an outlet for me to get some of my thoughts out, and have something to reference back to years, months, days, hours from now when all this stuff has slipped from my memory.  *As I get older I seem to be losing more and more memories -- it sucks!*

So to start off, I've been busy lately with photography and working on my lighting techniques.  I have to contribute much of my understanding of light to David Hobby and Joe McNally both these guys have a ridiculous amount of experience in the lighting arena.  David Hobby operates the extremely popular blog dedicated to the Strobist community while Joe McNally is a former National Geographic photographer who has moved onto sharing his wealth of knowledge through workshops, training videos, and books such as "The moment it clicks" and "The hotshoe diaries" (you can find both on amazon.com).  Check out these guys when you get a chance... they're both interesting (read: as funny as they are insightful) characters and I always look forward to reading their next posts.

I think I was able to get some of my best "in-studio" images this week thanks in part to the information that I was able to leech from these fellas.  The image above was taken in the studio using only my nikon speedlights and an assortment of lighting modifiers to achieve the fashion/beauty look that I was going for.  Hannah, who is already a natural at modeling only after a couple of sessions, willingly offered to be my model as I work on different lighting approaches and techniques.  So I've been putting mucho time researching and finding images that we can create. I love playing the role of the mad scientist behind all of this craziness >=D *muahaha*

The breakdown:

The top image was taken using two nikon sb-800 triggered via CLS (Nikon's proprietary wireless iTTL system) in manual mode, which were bouncing off of a large white reflector into a scrim to diffuse the light once even more.  The lighting was placed at camera right just in front of Hannah.  The image sandwiched in the middle couldn't have been any easier.  It was taken with a single shoot through umbrella again triggered again via CLS in manual mode.  The umbrella was positioned above and just left of the camera axis.  The bottom image used the same large light source as the top picture with two additional lights placed at 45 degrees behind Hannah for added the added rim and hair light.  Since I only have two speedlights at the moment that support CLS, I switched to full manual operation and triggered the strobes via my Elinchrome Skyports (more on wireless triggering in another post).

Hannah was rather pleased with the images that she received from that shoot and I learned that I absolutely love soft lighting and the ability to Keep-It-Simple-Stupid for these sort of shoots.  As you can see, you can achieve soft beautiful light from simply one single light source, and slowly introduce additional lights with out things getting overly complicated =)