Dave Frost Photography - Canvey Island » flash

Messing about with the tubes again

Dave Frost — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 09:52:18 +0000

November – Right. Crappy weather busy at work and aside from the Football I don’t think I’ve taken a photo for fun for months.
Someone on the talkphotography forums had asked a few questions about Kenko Tubes so I dragged mine out of the bag and had a play….
Nothing special but not a bad result for 10 minutes titting about. The one with the flash underneath will be interesting to play with and try to recover some of the stamen detail…..

The Scream

Dave Frost — Thu, 26 May 2011 20:36:03 +0000

Imagine my delight when the humdrum and otherwise normal Thursday evening of pointless TV was interrupted by the discovery of a dead fly.
Armed with the off camera flash, wireless triggers ant a 12mm Kenko Tube, I first drew some stick like pictures and posed the corpse. You know the stuff, staircases, horses etc.
None of these were particularly good, so I just tried different angles for the flash, at different power settings until I came up with this.

Can’t be bothered to do much processing so you get it here in all it’s dead, and decaying glory….. Quite like the ‘expression on it’s poor dead face.

Iced water and processed peas

Dave Frost — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 17:14:05 +0000

Following on from the plain droplet shots I found myself with another spare few minutes and tried something completely new…..

Learned quite a bit.

1) clean the glass, then clean it again
2) Frozen peas don’t make much of a splash
3) trying to drop things in a glass of water and photograph them at the same time is tricky
3) clean the glass, then clean the glass again
4) clean the glass
5) Bubbles form in the water without dropping anything in – nuisance.
6) Clean the glass.

Nice try, but no banana

Dave Frost — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:57:53 +0000

I’ve seen quite a few shots recently involving playing cards and motion blur so though I’d have a go myself having borrowed a rather nice Manfrotto Tripod from a friend. I didn’t realise how hard this is to do by yourself !! – For those interested, the Flash was bounced off of the ceiling, and the exposure was metered for the ambient light minus around 1 stop.
Multiple test shots gave me a resultant shutter speed of 1/5 @ f6.3 which captured the movement of the cards quite nicely when I was able to get the timing right. Keeping an eye on the timer, and making sure the cards are within the frame was rather tricky, and I only ended up with two usable shots from 20 or so attempts

Sadly, my living room is too small to not have included the wall in the shot. I already had to clone out a bit of sofa behind me. This for me, makes this shot pretty much just below average, but at least it’s good practice. I thought about trying to remove the wall by copying or cloning in more floor, but my PS skills fall way too short to even attempt it.

Added to the list of shots to re-try properly at some point this year.

They say that the eyes are the window to the soul…

Dave Frost — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:30:22 +0000

If that’s true, then my windows need cleaning or I have no soul. This was another one of those, what shall I do now moments. So I attached the nifty fifty to the 30D, stuck in 24mm of extension tubes and wobbled back and forth in front of the lens with the camera remote in hand. Out of 10 or so shots, this one was the only one nearly in focus.

eye macro photo by dave frost

I guess I’ll be getting bored with the macro shots shortly so will have some “proper” photos up here again before the end of the month !!

Me, Myself and I

Dave Frost — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:06:38 +0000

It’s been a while since I posted any pictures of me, or indeed pictures with me in them. This is partly because I’m usually the other side of the camera, and partly because I’m such an ugly barsteward. I’ve been thinking about a shot like this for ages, and today, finally got round to having a play. The edit was a quick and dirty one as a proof of concept, but I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out under the circumstances.
Set up wise it’s fairly straightforward all you need really is a tripod, but in this case I also used a Speedlight 430EX.
Settings should be manual, this helps to ensure that the exposure is the same for each shot which in turn makes it easier to blend post production. (fortunately it’s a grey day so didn’t need to worry about changes in ambient light as the sun went in and out).
To take the pictures, I set the camera on timer, pressed the button and adopted my poses. OK, was a bit of running about, but hey, I need the excercise.
Once taken the three pictures were imported into Adobe RAW, and all given the same, desaturated treatment.
Then, I opened them all in photoshop, and copied two as new layers into the third one.
Thereafter, it was simply a matter of using the eraser tool to remove the bits I didn’t want and reveal the “me” underneath.
Job done.

Was all good fun, and I managed to convince the kids that my brothers had popped round while they were at school. Confused the hell out of them as they know that I have no brothers.

Another water droplet for your viewing pleasure.

Dave Frost — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:40:36 +0000

Decided there’s too much blue on this site already, so posting a photo taken with flash, but white balance set to tungsten doesn’t really help. Decided I needed to balance it ou with this one from the same shoot.

Water droplet shapes

Dave Frost — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:36:58 +0000

Had some fun at the weekend, playing with my new wireless flash triggers, a kitchen sink and some water.¬† Was a bit slapdash with the setup in that I didn’t clean the sink or worry too much about the choice of lens.¬† Basic setup was;

Camera – Canon 30D attached to a very very cheap sub ¬£10 tripod.

Flash – Canon 430ex, with cheapy wireless trigger/receivers

Sink – One scratched and dirty stainless steel kitchen sink

Breadboard – One scarred and scratched wooden one (propped against the taps and used as a reflector for the flash)

Water, around 2 pints of, sloshing around the bottom of the aforementioned sink.

Was going to use my remote shutter release as well (for the very first time since I bought it several months ago, but decided not to.¬† Setting wise, the flash was in manual mode, dialled down to 1/16th power.¬† The Camera was in Manual, with Aperture set at¬†f7.1/f8.0 and a shutter speed of 1/250, focal length was 50mm using the Tamron 17-50mm f2.8

So, with the tap dripping slowly, and the flash aimed squarely at the breadboard, I proceeded to attempt shutter murder by firing off a hundred or so shots. Most of them were rather uninpiring captures of an empty sink, but one or two were worth keeping. Next time I try this, I’ll be making sure the sink’s clean and I’m going to invest in sometheing a little more colourful as a reflector !!

Minerals and Metals

Dave Frost — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:25:26 +0000

Minerals and Metals

Originally uploaded by DaveFrost

The final entry for the August Photographer of the year round.
A bit of a makeshift shot as the arty ones I set up for all turned out rather badly. Was only as I sipped this contemplating abject failure I realised that the answer to the theme was evaporating before my very eyes.

Taken against the sun, exposed for the sky then dialled down to underexpose by 1 stop then dialled in -2 on the 430ex.

The bottle was hand held in my left hand while I adroitly operated the camera with my right. Quite pleased with th result but wasn’t what I wanted for the theme