Old Circuit

Using Nikon D70s, Tamron SP Di 90/2.8 1:1 Macro, Soligor extension tubes, SB-600. Developed in Adobe Lightroom.

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Nikon D70s, SB-600, Soligor extenders, Tamron SP Di 90/2.8 1:1 Macro, Adobe Lightroom

Yesterday visiting some friends I brought my lightstand and umbrella and snapped a few portraits. It is incredible what a difference a few simple things can do to improve a photograph. It is all about the light.

One SB-600 into silver brolly camera left 35-45 degrees off center and about head height looking slightly down.

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Nikon cameras (and most certainly others as well) has a button on the back side of the camera called AE-L / AF-L. The normal function of this button is to lock exposure and auto-focus so that you may recompose the shot and then press the shutter release without the camera attempting a new focus or metering and changing the exposure parameters.

This article will start off on the D70s camera that I have, but should work very similar on most Nikon digital bodies. It may also be the same for Canon and other brands although I have not verified it. If you know, please leave a comment to this effect!

Most people are probably aware that in the camera CSM menu item #15 you can control what this button actually does. The obvious choices here are the following:

• Lock exposure and auto-focus at the same time (AF/AE mode)
• Lock only auto-focus (AF mode)
• Lock only exposure (AE mode)

What people generally do not know is that there are two more modes that are very useful in certain situations. These modes are:

• Auto focus ON mode (AF-ON mode)
• Flash metering off mode (FV mode)

They are not so well described in the manual and so you may want to practice a bit with using them! The rest of this article is to describe some situations where they are quite useful:
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Recently Jeanette bought some nice potted flowers and that prompted me to whip out the camera again to try to make a study of a rose petal. This flower that has been the theme of many songs, paintings, music, love letter, photographs and even statues still fascinates people and the florists comes up with new hybrids every now and then.

I have used the Tamron 90mm f/2.8 to take these pictures since it gives me the best control over the focus depth and also allows very close range focusing.

SB-600 flash used to even up the lighting a bit in TTL-BL (balanced) mode.

One of the more difficult things to light are glassware and bottles containing liquids. I experimented quite some time before I got something that was reasonable here. I am using a cheap light tent to get an even spread of the lights here and it still took some doing.

I am using two tungsten lights of 50 W each and my SB-600 flash aimed at the background. Camera WB is set for tungsten so the flash becomes very blu-ish in color which was the idea, this masks the creases and wrinkles in the white backdrop for some reason. (more…)