something smells fishy in the state california,

today I went with Kim and her cute little daughter to take some potraets of them (which turned to be excellent, since I just finished the first sd card and have around 25 shots already) and my camera misfired about 50% of the tim...

you press the shutter button and it just refuses to fire. Now It could be that the onboard flash just overheated, since it worked fine when I use it without the flash. Which I just hope and which tells me I shoot to many pictures and should get a dedicated commander or worse pocketwizards (perfect solution just so expensive...)

I also ended up with alot of natural light shot's which seem to be quiete nice. It's impressive what happens at the golden hour. They just have this WOW quality and need barley postprocessing.

Ok how do I shoot potraits?

available light only:

1. go in manual mode
2. set your desired aperature
3. set your desired shutter speed
4. set auto iso to 800 and let it figure out the rest
5. as metering matrix or spot metering, depending on situation

flash and available light combination:

1. go in manual mode
2. set shutter speed to 1/250th
3. set an aperature of your choice
4. set iso two 200 - 400 to reduce the workload for the flashs
5. arange you light's, basically one on the left, one from the front
6. set them to 1/2
7. chimp with the display,iso,flash power,aperature till you get the correct exposure
8. balance with the ambient light. Rule of dumb, the slower the shutter speed, the more ambiant light you get

important lesson:

put some heavy stuff on your lightstands/umbrellas. Since the wind blows them over which means you loose 40$ for some new umbrellas or try to fix them with ducttape.

well after taking the potraits of lindsay today, first time ever with two umbrellas in public and testing something totally new. Yes i am a photo nerd...

Well SB-600 are great flashes for indoor work or to work in the shade with, but they are pretty much useless in the bright sun. They have just not enough power and it seems that I won't buy anymore of them.

Seems that the next flash will be an SB-800 or I have to shoot pictures after the 'golden' hour. An SB-900 would be even nicer, but at 500$ a pop and SB-800 for 300$ a pop, well it's not really a question anymore.
After all it's just a hobby...

I also could just shoot at ISO-400 or ISO-800, but this means that I never get nice sharp sparkling eyes. And a portrait without these is just pointless. Ok there is a solution to shoot sparkling eyes at up to ISO 1600 - 3200, it's called D3/D700 and way out of the reach of my wallet. (For now at least)

Why a third flash in the first place?

now I need a hair light or rim light from time to time to give my pictures this particular edge and to be more flexible.

Today I did some potrait shots with my two flashes, umbrellas, couple of gels and my nikon 35mm F/2 and Tamron 70-200mm F/2.8

now the comparison between the 17-55 and the 19-35mm is a little bit different. Here we can clearly see differences between these two lenses.

The Nikon is definitely superior at F/3.5 and F/4.5 since the Tokina is very soft at this apertures. But since the focal length are used for landscape pictures anyway, well it doesn't really matter. And you also don't really use this for potraits. Well you use 35mm for potraits, but for this I would just order a Nikon 35mm F/2 or Sigma F/1.4 which cost less than 300$ these days.

But once you hit F/8 the lenses are pretty much equal again and the tokina holds it's stand very well and even seems to have better CA values. Once you hit F/11 both lenses start to get soft again, thanks to difraction, but the Tokina seems to be a touch faster.

Well the message is clear. Return the 17-55mm, buy a 35mm F/2, which can be used on full frame in the future and put the rest of the money towards your saving account for a nice trip.

I could test my sigma 10-20 now against it, but this is getting pretty pointless after I already know that I return it.

Last night I posted this picture in a newsgroup and finally got some nice reviews about my pictures from other photographs.

The reason I'm doing this is not to get responses like:

• nice picture
• wow
• wonderful

I get these responses from friends and I highly appreciate them, but they don't help me. I want to here critique so that I learn to avoid mistakes in the future. As an example this was a review I got for a picture from June last year:

Hey, I went to your link and your images all need work starting from the basic. Composition is off, lack of defined subject matter, exposure, etc… You are not using your photography skills to focus the viewer. I get lost in your images because; I am not sure what you want me to be looking at. Learn some rules like Rule of 3, Leading lines, Sunny 16 etc… Then expand your knowledge by more professional standards by reading, viewing other professional images, workshops, mentorship, etc…

Which told me, your pcitures suck, stop wasting my time and learn the basic. The problem with this was, when I showed these pictures to friends at this time, they liked them and told me great pictures.

Lesson: friends tell you most of the time it looks good, but to hear it from another photograph you don't know is way more value able.

So since this review I read a lot of books, put my camera away for 3 month and gave up, came back to it and invested in some good glass and started reading more and more about the topic and browsing a lot of books at stores.

Now what can I say about books:

• they show you pictures and tell you how they where taken
• you read them once or twice
• you can get the same information in the internet for free
• they improve your technique, but only to a certain point
• they are really boring to read
• they mostly repeat them self over and over again, like books about exposure.
• they show how me how difficult photography was in the old days when you had no display to evaluate your picture after a shot and to correct to exposure
  

Now one year later I got these reviews for a potraet which was done with a simple flash shot against the fall and a reflector to fill in some shadows. Basically do it the strobist way. Means use small strobes, be portable and flexible, break the rules and just have fun. (you do need to learn the rules first, thats why I read alot about them)

My best review was:

Re: C&C on a potrait please NEW
Martin Caie - 12 hours ago

Looks awesome to me. Looks like the kind of shot that would be in a biography if this lady were famous. I was going to say it was obviously a longer focal length because you avoided distortion, and now I see it was indeed (90mm).

Re: C&C on a potrait please NEW
K huack - 8 hours ago
Excellent photo. Can't find anything to fault.

Re: C&C on a potrait please NEW
allreddv - 4 hours ago

I think it a really great photo and a great pose. I have a couple of suggestions but please take them with a grain of salt. Since you are trying to concentrate on skin I think she is a little over exposed and you have lost quite a bit of detail in her skin. Especially around the nose and in the hand. The same is true with her lips and around them. I see you shot with at 3.5 and ISO 400. Why such a large aperture? If you step down just a but and lowered the ISO this might have given more detail. You really caught the look for her I believe and it is a great portrait. Again just some thoughts from someone else trying to learn to do the same. Would you mind posting the original?

The complete discussion can be found here.

Maybe one day I will consider to use an umbrella, they are just so:

• I wanna be pro but don't make money
• now I went totally nuts
  
• take this thing out of my face

So I think I stick with little flash's and diffusers.

Update:

I got some more critic and needed to update the picture. These seems to be the current final version.