Tara – High Key

Tech Info: Nikon D300s with 24-70 @70mm, ISO 200, f/2.8 for 1/100 sec.

SB900 placed off camera low right fired with 1/32 of its power.

During thanksgiving weekend, borrowlenses had deal going on and I rented a SB900 speedlite with Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. Plan was to play with these things for the entire week. Had loads of fun and quite a lot of learning too.

I wanted to try a shot at getting a high key image (one where the overall image borders on being complete white). Getting Nidhi to stay still for even a second is quite a challenge these days. So I choose the second one as she still maintains a separate brain for each of her major body part. Getting them all co-ordinated takes a while and that is useful for me 🙂

Used a pink fleece throw as a background and gave the little one a bit of tummy time. I was on the floor like a sniper. SB900 was set to custom mode with 1/32 of its power, placed to camera right on the floor, triggered using optical wireless. The pop-up flash can be used for triggering other speedlites and it helps to get the main speedlite off camera. To soften the light, used the dome that came along with the flash unit.

Enough care was taken not to blowout any highlights. During post, used couple of layers of curves to turn things close to white.

The part where I screwed up is in sharpening. Usually my workflow consists of apply sharpening as the last stage. While working on this one, I was so happy that I applied the settings to a full size image and later while uploaded for the web, just reduced the size. This results in all kinds of problems and in this case, gave jpeg artifacts. What I should have done was to resize the image for the web and then apply a tinge of sharpening. Note to self, stick with the basics.