So, okay, here’s the mermaid.
She cost 6.99 in Atlantic Homecare, bought when I expected to use her as fodder for experimenting with the 50mm 1.8 that everyone apparently should have. She is a mass produced dust gatherer currently living on my mantlepiece because I haven’t found it in my heart to dump her or find a box for her in the so called hobby room. Today, I decided to take her out because I was playing with DSLR Remote Shooter on the iPhone. It apparently has an intervalometer. I had visions of also being able to tell it to leave the camera open for oh, 15 minutes at a time – star trails, don’t you know and the moon is pretty funky tonight.
If it does that, I haven’t figured out out yet. I could use it as an intervalometre to do a timelapse but as I need a computer nearby, that rules out some of the time lapses I have in mind. Anyway, tonight, I took down the mermaid and her sister the fairy to play with my flash, my remote wireless shooter thing (the iPhone that requires the computer and the camera to be connected so the next thing I want is some sort of a wireless connection between the computer and the camera – dang it this is expensive), and got the 580 Speedlite and the box of gels.
That turned out to be a fiasco so after half an hour, I was playing with a maglite torch instead. The picture above was lit using the Maglite torch and it probably had a green gel on it at the time.
Here is the fairy – lit with the maglite -
and lit with the Speedlite.
Oh yeah, that probably had a pink gel on it.
From this experiment I have learned things. Namely, the fairy sucks as a model. Her face is really at the wrong angle to get anywhere near an adequate bit of light on it. As 6.99 goes, it was not, I fear well spent.
Also, when I am doing these things, I need to wear black clothes. I destroyed something like 60 photographs by appearing in them – very blurry – myself.
The intervalometer doesn’t quite work as I expect it. Having coughed up 19.99 for it out of my birthday iTunes vouchers, this is a touch disappointing. You can control the whole camera with it, however, so at some point in the future when I feel like experimenting with self portraits again, I might feel it’s more worth the money. It managed to convince itself the camera was on burst mode so typically took about 5 photographs without my input either. That added to the wastage.
Sometimes twenty euro worth of torch is a better lighting tool than 500E worth of Canon Speedlite.
There are elements of the flash lit Fairy that I like. I hate the fact that the angle of her face screwed it up big time. For that…hmmm. I could never quite get the light from behind her head to work properly without the thing looking into a giant Fail at lightpainting. But my favourite of the three shots is the Maglite lit mermaid.
Would I do this again? Well, it’s hard to say. My living room sucks as a studio and I had to block off all the standby lights using remote controls.
All told, I’m sorry I didn’t take one of the tiny lighthouses and go to Poolbeg to do some forced perspective on lighthouses instead. The fact that it’s freezing cold may have something to do with it though.
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