Monday, January 23, 2012

Absolut Speedlight

It didn’t take me long to start practicing with the Nikon Speedlight SB-700 that I got after the New Year and after shooting some images, I should of purchased one much sooner! With cold weather outside, the basement turned into a “product” studio for Absolut vodka using bar stools and coffee tables.

I used a wide range of equipment to get these close up images of the bottles and it all started with the D90 on the Slik 500DK tripod in RAW mode and using f6.3 to f16 in aperture priority mode. ISO was either set at 200 or 400 to keep noise low. The lenses used were Nikon 18-105mm, Nikon 70-300mm and the Sigma 50-150mm. I used the Zeikos extension tubes on these lenses to fill the frame with the bottle or Absolut logo itself.  All autofocus systems were turned off along with VR on the lenses.
The excitement of this “product” shoot on Absolut bottles was these were taken with no lights on in the basement. The Nikon SB-700 lit up the bottles by using it as a remote flash unit. This allowed me to manually adjust the flash output from 1/1 all the way down to 1/128 if desired along with changing the position of the flash to light up the bottles.  To change the “warmth” of the flashes light discharge, the incandescent and diffusion filters were used. Food coloring in the bottles filled with water helped create different colored bottles and a very neat illusion.
ViewNX was used to process the RAW files by changing the picture control to the custom curves of Landscape-Nature and Mono Snow Goose that I created a while back and use often. Since the flash did a great job of lighting up the subject, exposure compensation and shadow/highlight sliders were seldom used.
A little work was done in PSE8 by straighten the images and cropping them after I finalized them in ViewNX. A few scratches and other lines on the Absolut bottles were cloned out using the cloning brush tool.
After taking these images, I can see that the SB-700 will get a workout on my camera or off the camera as I continue to learn how and when to use it to help with lighting conditions.

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