I've been playing with my camera some more. I've been trying out shooting in raw mode. To be honest, my camera does such a good job with Jpegs, there really is not too much difference between the two. I often use curves to pull in the light and dark and tighten up the contrast but this can be done either with the raw file or in paintshop pro with the Jpeg file. If anything, raw takes that bit longer to save to the card and to convert to Jpeg for uploading so I'm seeing very little point. I'll persevere with it as it makes little difference to me at this time but I imagine that if I had lots of photos to process from a photo shoot this would become an issue. Likewise, if I'm out and about and I find that I fill up my memory cards with raw files when I could fit a lot more high quality jpegs on them, then it would also be an issue.


Still trying out my strobes. This one was done in our dining room. Background light was about 1m from the wall and set to 50% power. A second strobe was set at 45 degrees above and to the left of Jo, about 70cm away with a bounced white umbrella and set to 50% power. The original came out fine but I used a screen layer in paintshop pro just to brighten the image some more. Jo was getting all funny about having her photo taken and she says that she does not like this one. I like it because it was one of the only ones I could get where she looked halfway near relaxed.



I thought I would show a bit about my new lighting pack. Above is a picture of the remote trigger for the flash units. The square bit sits in the hotshoe on the camera. I have to turn on "External Flash" in the camera settings so that it knows to use the hotshoe instead of the internal flash. When the shot is taken, it sends a signal to the receiver (The bit with the wire) which is plugged into one of the flash units. The other flash units are set up as slaves which means that they use a little sensor on the tops which, when they "see" a flash, they quickly fire themselves. This way, I don't have complicated wires conecting all of the flash units together. I don't know if there is any disadvantages of using a wireless trigger over a wired one but to date I have not had any problems. One thing I did do is put larger labels on the On/Off switch on the receiver because the writing is tiny and did not stand out. So rather than getting a magnefying glass each time I wanted to check that the receiver was on or off, I just stuck a couple of labels on it.




These are the flash units themselves. Each one is rated at 250w but has an analogue dial tha allows adjustment of the power. I was playing yesterday with the distance of the flash and the power settings. My biggest obstacle now is space. Space is at a premium in our home. Another problem is lack of willing models for me to practice on. Ellie is quite often at school on my days off and Jo is just uncooperative all the time. I'm looking to get some more backdrops so I've been offering to do photos for people in hope of making enough money to get the extra bits I need. I could really do with a light meter but I'm amazed at just how expensive they are.

On a side note, I'm down to 13st 3lbs. I'm pretty much still on target to reach my ideal weight by the end of the month. I'm down a notch on my belt which I'm pleased about. I haven't been less than 13st 8lbs in about 15 years so I'm really excited about reaching my ideal weight.

I've currently got painful cracked chapped lips which are so sore I've had to resort to putting lip balm on. I'm very texture orientated, so having this stuff on my lips is like nails down a chalk board. I hate it but it has taken the pain away so I'll try to persevere with it.