Rorschach, blowing your background, and the joy of learning something new
This is Rorschach.
He started life with Dora Designs, and we brought him home sometime after we lost our beloved Tilly the dachshund, and sometime before we felt ready to have a real live dog in the house again.
Rorschach is by far the best behaved dog we’ve had. He never barks, he sits and stays where he’s told and has never left a puddle on the floor.
Today he has been helping me figure out how to combine studio lights with a speedlite to blow out the background. He’s a perfect model as he just sat there patiently while I scratched my head, googled manuals and fiddled with settings.
Because studio lighting is so new for me I’m going to record my settings here so I know where to find them if I need them again. Feel free to ignore this bit unless it’s something you’re interested in.
This set up used a bit of white polar fleece hung over a backdrop stand at the rear. My Canon 430ex ii on its little stand sat on the floor behind Rorschach, pointing up at the polar fleece. Attached to it a Yongnuo 622c transceiver in manual mode.
Two Elinchrom D-lites were unimaginatively set at 45 degrees (roughly) either side of the little guy.. These were set to have the Skyport off (press up and down arrows together then set to 0).
On camera, the Yongnuo controller, set to manual. Camera also on manual with shutter speed 250, ISO 100 and Aperture at f8 (not sure why f8, I could and should have been lower but it meant less mucking around with the position and power of the key and fill lights and the purpose of the exercise was to get the Yongnuo set to trigger the speedlite and the Elinchrom lights to act as Optical Slaves).
And once I’d figured those variables out they all fired together and I’d learned something new. Clearly more finessing in future, but we all start somewhere.
