Aliens Have Landed

March 21, 2010

New Studio Lights Arrive

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Aliens Have Landed

The mood here at Digital Mitchell has been a happy one now that our new studio strobe lights arrived. Dawn & I have been playing with them from the moment we opened the box!

We ordered an AlienBee B800 Strobe light straight from the factory in Nashville, TN. The company is a division of Paul C. Buff Inc. and you can find them at www.alienbees.com. The lights come in various colors but we choose black, since they did not have any purple! The B800s have 320 true Ws but really have an effective Ws of 800 more them enough light for our portrait needs and enough for our wedding needs. (Ws: Quantity of electrical energy is measured in Wattseconds, also known as Joules. This rating defines the amount of electrical power discharged with each flash.) They even work well for lighting the Concord High School Girls Lacrosse team outside in the sun. My photographer friend Rob Miller of Rellim Photos www.rellimphotos.com had me help him with the team and individual shots for his daughters team, and he used two B800s which worked really well, except for when the wind caught one of them and knocked it to the ground...but it got up still working fine!

The only disappointing thing about the arrival of the AlienBees was that the two Translucent White "Shoot-Thru" Umbrellas were back ordered. So we had to be creative with how we bounced the light in order to get “soft” lighting when Dawn & I were taking pictures of each other when we were “playing” with them right out of the box. The umbrellas are just that; an umbrella like you would use during a raining day, except that this one is white and is a little see-thru but can also have a reflective outer fabric attached to it so that it will reflect or bounce the light backwards. The good news is that they will be here in a few days!

Lighting is everything to photography. Ok, without it you wouldn’t be able to take the picture in the first place, but what I mean is that by managing lights and being creative with them, the photographer can really create some really captivating pictures. When someone says “mood lighting” you kind of know what they mean without actually seeing an example, right? Well, that is what photographers do, they create moods with light. We paint our subjects with light. With the AlienBees, we can now better create the mood that we want the viewer to be in when looking at the final picture.

Lighting is important, however the creative eye of the photographer is the most important. Just like it is not the camera that makes the picture, it is not the lights that make it either. What makes a really good picture is the combination of subject, lighting and the mood that the photographer creates. These things are the qualities that make up a great photograph.

Dawn and I will always be working on creating great photographs, as you can never stop learning to create beautiful shots.

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