James and Bay

So, many  times, my good friend Chris King and I end up playing with camera gear, taking pictures of each other, when we have nothing better to photograph. Last Friday, the two of us had nothing going on and thought that busting out so lighting gear would be fun.

Some of the gear that we were using was even older then the two of us. Because we didn't have all our gear with us, we used a Canon XT for our camera body, Vivitar 283 ( old model with high voltage trigger) for a flash, Wein peanut pre-flash canceling optical trigger as an old skool Pocket Wizard, and a 30" shoot-through umbrella. 

We mounted the umbrella to a Manfrotto lite-tite umbrella adapter and used a shoe mount for the Vivitar flash. From there we popped the flash on the camera and put it to the lowest exposure we could and had the flash at around medium, shooting through the umbrella. The reason we had to pop the flash was because, with not have actual Pocket Wizards, the Wein Peanut pre-flash triggers only worked if it was able to read the signal from the pop flash. 

We were going for just a little bit of light on the center of the face. We were doing this in Chris' bedroom so there was not a lot of space to do this but, in the end I think what we had to work with, we made something decent.