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One of the things I’ve wanted to explore for a while now with my (infrequent) photography is off-camera flash. Well, just before we headed off to Africa (which is partly the reason I haven’t posted till now) I had my first decent shoot with my god son, Henry:

To get this shot (and others similar) I used a large piece of blue matt board for the background. This was lit with a bare Canon 580EX II speedlite at 1/64th power. For the main light I used a Canon 430EX at 1/2 power through a 43″ shoot-through umbrella (with a silver reflector opposite). Both speedlites fired wirelessly using the AlienBee CyberSync trigger system (this was my first real go with the AlienBees; previously I had been using a Gadget Infinity Cactus V2 remote trigger, which just wasn’t very reliable):

I’m really happy with how the shots came out, although there was some minor post-production in Aperture 3 (minor overall exposure adjustment and skin smoothing). Using the Canon EF-S 60mm f 2.8 macro lens also contributed to the overall result, as it produces much sharper images than the kit lenses I got with 400D.

For those interested in seeing some more photos from the shoot (not all of which were lit with flash), check out this set on Flickr, or the below video produced after a brief play with the new slideshow tools in Aperture 3: