What do you do when it’s past midnight on a cold dark Christmas evening & there’s nothing on TV? Put on a 100mm 1:1 macro lens and look for something to point it at! For me the Christmas tree with all of it’s lights and decorations was an obvious target. This is the first time I’d been taking photos for the sheer fun of it in a long time. I was using a macro lens so that nothing would be too close or far away, giving me complete freedom - a principal which dictated my entire approach to the shoot.

If you don’t have a dedicated macro lens there are several options to getting close focus - extension tubes, screw on close up adaptors and finally reversing a telephoto lens.

Other than that you only need a tripod - camera shake is exacerbated by working close to your subject and the relatively dim output of the fairy lights is not going to get you anywhere near hand holding territory! I had the aperture wide open at f/2.8 and this obviously has the effect of reducing depth of field, but the main reason I was shooting wide open, however, was so that I could simply look through the viewfinder and see exactly what I was getting (without having to keep pressing DOF preview). Shoot into something hollow such as a Christmas tree and there will be detail at many of depths, selective focus allows you to pick out what you want and pretty much defines the shot.

I was simply moving the camera around, turning the focus ring and just seeing what looked interesting. The best thing about self assigned projects (or rather, messing around) is that there are no constraints and no penalty if it all goes wrong. It’s something I’m going to force myself to do more often from now on as it not only will it help brush up on technique but it’s good to relax and recharge creativity (you can tell we’re getting to that resolution making time of year again). That’s pretty much it except to say read on to see the results, and do give it a go yourself!

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I’m going to start this with a quick recap for people who might be unsure of what a ring light/flash is or why they should care, those of you who came here for the review may skip straight to the “read the rest…” link at the bottom!

A ring light surrounds the lens and produces images with an intense glowing look and faint ‘halo’ like shadow around the subject. They have been very popular with fashion photographers for a while although opinions on their use tend to differ…

Until recently the only commercially available ring flashes were either the AC powered studio variety or the hotshoe mount macro ring lights. Neither of these are particularly well suited to shooting people on the go - the big lights require an even bigger battery or long extension chord and the macro version simply isn’t powerful enough. Now there is a third alternative in the form of adaptors that take an existing hotshoe flash and turn it into a ring flash through a series of special reflectors inside a ring shaped diffuser.

As an events photographer who strongly dislikes on camera direct flash this option is extremely attractive I preorded the Orbis as soon as shipping was announced. Read on to find out what it’s like to shoot with under real world conditions and more importantly what it does for your images!

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I should say at the head that this post is not really about photography. But before I get a head of myself, it does head in a similar direction… Ok I’m done.

This is my contribution to The Head Project which, in case you didn’t know, is “a work of worldwide collaborative fiction”. Basically you get a head for two weeks, it is yours to do as you please with the only condition that you document your experiences, feed it and post it off to the next person when the two weeks are over.

So the box arrives in York, and for the first time I begin to get a sense of what the project is really about. The container itself, the outer protective shell of the head is clearly well travelled. There are many addresses scrawled over the cardboard with a return to: in Chicago and it arrives bearing documents from the Icelandic post office. Global indeed. I decided my contribution should coincide with where my own head is at…

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Tunnel
Originally uploaded by
era145

Now that the admin/design work is essentially done I’m going to be updating this blog a lot more regularly, so I thought I’d let you know a little bit about what I’ve got planned for the next few weeks. Firstly I’ll be writing up my contribution to The Head Project, (a ‘work of worldwide collaborative fiction’), I’ll be documenting my experiences shooting with the new Orbis™ ringflash adaptor in the wild, there’ll be a behind the scenes look at a few recent shoots, some winter macro flash photography, and of course there’ll be a lot more linkage to keeps things going in between. Stay tuned.

MG