Portrature

Yesterday, I did a small photoshoot with my brother in law. He needed some profile photos that would look nice and not too formal. So I set up my gear, and darkened the room.

 I used both of my studio lights(Walimex VE-200 and VE-400), Nikon D7100, Tamron SP 24-70 f/2.8 VR, and SB-700 flash to trigger the lights. I do have some wireless triggers, but I was having trouble triggering the lights with them. Probably because they are cheap and I was doing 1/2000th of a second shutterspeed and the triggers just couldn't keep up. We were in a small room and wanted the background to be really dark or even black. Since I had to trigger the lights with SB-700, I couldn't get the background as I wanted, because I had to use my flash at almost 1/8th power to trigger both lights. Any lower power and one of the lights wouldn't trigger. So, I kinda had too much light I think. But still, I'm very pleased with the images I got, and maybe this background even works for these photos.

 The setup was simple. I had my subject sitting on a small stool, as far away from the back wall as I could get. I darkened the room by putting some blanket on the window, since there was still some light outside. And I closed the door. I put my studio lights fairly close to him, left a tiny path in the middle, where I could shoot through. The VE-200 was left of me and VE-400 on the right side. I played around with the settings of the lights a bit, and finally put them on 1.5 power, so it was pretty low. If I had put the power any lower, I would have needed to get the lights even closer to him, and I wouldn't have had any space to shoot through. Only win about lower power would have been, that it wouldn't have lit the background as much. 

As I already said, I had my camera set on 1/2000th of a sec. Aperture was on 2.8 and ISO 100. I mostly tried shooting at around 50mm(around 70mm because of crop sensor), because I didn't want to stretch my subject too much, and I found that it was looking pretty nice at that focal length.

 Overall, I have been super pleased with the D7100 and Tamron SP24-70mm f/2.8 VR. And, also with the Walimex lights :) They were really a great buy!

Here's some images :)