Penguins are highly regarded creatures in our house, so much so that in recent years trips abroad, especially to aquariums, often result in the number of them residing in our house increasing. It all started in a car in Tasmania with an imaginary penguin called Francis (who now lives in Cabra) , but that’s another story.
What these penguins (from left to right: Prionsias, Frankie and Porky shown with their sea-otter friend Scratchy) do very well is stand still, and as such make good subjects for some lighting experiments.
This photograph was taken using a Lumiquest Softbox III which I got for Christmas last year – it’s a compact light modifier that folds flat, but opens out into a mini softbox, maybe about 10″ square, that velcros on to a flash. If softens the light from the flash, but as it is still a relatively small light source, not overly so. It can produce a nice hard/soft light effect for portraits which I have yet to really play with, and is so portable and light that it can be always in the camera bag, and so much more likely to be with me than, say, a shoot through umbrella.
While an SB-800 with one of these Sofbox III (incidentally it is called this as there were two previous smaller versions) is technically a small light source, it is all relative. And to these penguins (and sea otter) if used in close it is quite big, and so for their group portrait produces a nice soft light that efficiently illuminates all four of them.
The setup is simple – I am holding my D300 in my right hand, and my left hand is crossed over the camera, holding the SB-800 with the softbox mounted on it, above and to the camera right of the subjects. The scene is lit almost entirely by that light, with very little contribution from the ambient, and to control how much light hit the subjects as opposed to the background, I just varied the distances between the light and the subjects, and the subjects and the background. This is a good technique for when you have only one light source and want to control the light on two areas of the picture at the same time.
It takes a bit of getting used to, and I’m still refining it, but it’s surprising what you can manage with just one light. Add in this simple but effective light modifier, and you can take all sorts of photographs of stuffed animals!
Where’s Cisco?
Scratchy’s been at the rum again by the looks of him