First portrait

I do not have a human subject yet, except for my baby niece but she moves around too much. I know there are some techniques to take pictures of babies, but I have a bobble head of Cal Ripken that Karen T. gave me years ago. I thought he would be an excellent subject as he remains motionless throughout my shooting.

I took a half-body shot of the booble head and then cropped the image to show only the head which is where most of the attention is drawn to in a portrait photo.

I think I have found an ok way dealing with the built-in flash and the SB-800 I have. Shooting with the SB-800 speedlight mounted on the hotshoe is not the best way to shoot portrait. The light would always come from one angle and I would not be able to accentuate certain facial features if I wanted to without additional speedlights. Shooting without flash is fine as long as there is some sunlight. In fair ambient light, the photo can look a bit flat.

Here I have taken four shots of roughly the same pose -- I did not put my camera on a tripod so the poses are not exactly the same.

The first shot is without flash. In my room, I have two energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs, given off light the equivalent of one 60 watts incandescent light bulb. I think the Cal's face looks very flat. Not much features can be discerned. The photo is soft as well even with my f/1.8 lens because his head keeps on bobbing back and forth -- once it starts, it takes a long time to stabilize -- and I did not want to wait.

The second shot was with the SB-800 speedlight mounted on the hot shoe. The speedlight has a diffuser dome on and its power output reduced to 1/128 so as not to wash out the subject -- the camera was merely 40cm away from the bobble head. The result was not too bad. There is dark shadow behind his nose but apart from that, I like the lifting of facial features. His face looks a bit flat still though.

In the third photo, I took the speedlight off the camera and placed it about 30cm to the front right of the bobble head (i.e. front left of the camera). This shot is a little darker than the second shot because of the angle of light but I light that sparkle in his eyes. In portrait photography, the eyes have to be sharp but if there is that sparkle in it, it really draws your attention to the eyes even more -- compare these eyes vs those in the second shot.

A quick note about the off-camera flash: as I do not have a sync cable for my speedlight, for the third setup, I had to turn on the built-in flash but blocked it with my hand. The speedlight was set up as a remote flash and was triggered by the small amount of (UV) light that escapes from my hand, thus, I was able to remotely control the speedlight this way.

In the fourth shot, the exact same arrangement was made with the speedlight to the front right of the subject. However, instead of blocking the built-in flash, I placed a tissue paper in front of it to diffuse the light -- even when set at 1/128, the built-in flash would overpower the SB-800 at the distance and setting I had programmed the SB-800 for.

I do not know what you think but I prefer the fourth portrait over the others. There is that sparkle in the eyes and the shadows are not too dark so we get good facial definitions. Maybe I could have used a thinner issue paper to let me light from the built-in flash through but this shot is not too bad.

I want to try a fifth shot with some backlight but I need another speedlight for that. I think I will borrow my older brother's SB-600. It will work nicely as a remote flash. Yet another shot would be with an umbrella to cast a really nice soft light all over the bobble head. Well, I do not have these tools yet.