photog notes

I went out to shoot my sister's family tonight and it was a little darker than I had hoped. So we rearranged and made do. Here are a few of those shots...
In this image, I have a flash behind them to give a rim light and I have a flash through an umbrella camera right on a light stand. Both flashes have warming gels over them. I have been shooting with a really cold white balance (around 3000-3400) today to try a certain cold background with warm subjects.

From Allens2008

Here I added a small (Lumiquest) softbox over the flash behind them to give a softer light and moved the umbrella flash to camera left. Unfortunately, my f-stop was too wide open and didn't allow everyone to be in focus. (Mental note... even in small groups, shoot at f-stop 4.0 or 5.6, no smaller) One more...
Moving on... I wanted to see how far I could use commander mode on my Nikon to trigger the 2 flashes, so Amber got to be my subject again. Here I used a gold reflector (36 inch, I think) on the floor in front of subject. I shot a flash from 3 feet away from reflector to bounce up at subject... no warming filter this time, but still WB3000. The blue on the background was a CTB (blue gel) over a flash aimed at wall behind subject. I was pleased with being about 17 feet from subject and still trigger flashes.

On Camille's I just used one flash lower than eye level on camera right and still shot at WB3000. This one I took into photoshop and blue'd up the background a bit.
With all of these shots, I set the exposure value to -1.0 to -1.3 stops on the camera. Then I set the flashes to +1 on most of the shots. That way, my background was not as bright as my subjects. The flashes compensated for the camera and correctly exposed my subjects. The only exception was Amber's shot where I had the flashes set at 0 and the camera still at -1.0 stop.