It’s been pretty sunny in London recently, although not so much the last few days. Yesterday, however, the sun was threatening to come out from lunchtime and at around 3pm it finally did. I was sitting around indoors finding all sorts of ways to do not very much at all and finally realised going outside and maybe taking some photos would actually be pretty cool instead.
I walked over to Wandsworth Park and found a tiny patch of daisies – I was looking for something I could light with my new softbox (the LumiQuest Softbox III I posted about a while back). At first I just took photos of the daisies in natural light, playing with the wide angle lens I’d taken with me, the Sigma 10-20mm. I don’t often use it as it’s pretty stylised and only useful for particular things as opposed to general use so I don’t often walk around with it unless I’m specifically out on a ‘photo walk’ like this. It’s great fun every so often though, and worth remembering if you need a quick change of style.
In the rest of this post I’ll talk through the shots I took, including a few mistakes and learning points for myself.
UPDATE: February 2012 – I’ve long since disabled the Fotomoto plugin as part of general redesigning – it never generated a single penny anyway! Ah well.
(UPDATE: February 2012; after I posted this I realised that some of the latter shots were a bit dark; the effect of the Softbox is visible but needed a bit more power, and it was underexposed overall. For many, many months, years in fact, I always meant to dig out the shots and lift them a bit in Photoshop but never got around to it.
I first picked up a DSLR (or indeed any SLR) in 2005 when I bought my Nikon D70, and for the next 3 years flash lighting scared me witless. In a medium where light is everything, being unwilling and unable to get a grip on how to light with flash was sort of an embarrassment, to me at least, and so I embraced a style of photography that studiously avoided staged lighting – which I cunningly branded ‘urban observational photography’. So, er, basically cool stuff I spotted on the street, like this revolving billboard on the left.