Margarita on Flickr.

Alina on Flickr.

Alina in my studio. Make-up artist on the shoot was b.Perfect by Simone Zbinden (www.bperfect.ch).

blog.americanpeyote.com

Startup PIrate Portrait on Flickr.

Startup PIrate Portrait

Be brave, be crazy, be a Pirate!

I’m heading to Startup Pirates Lisboa, so I made this portrait for the event (lisboa.startuppirates.org/).

http://blog.americanpeyote.com/2012/01/12/arrrrrr-i-joined-the-pirates/

I was getting stuff ready for an upcoming wedding shoot and figured it would a fabulous time to put together a location lighting kit for nice light and versatility. For this the obvious option was to dig into my gear pile and I pulled out my Kacey bracket. I bought it with an Elinchrom ring attachment to go with my Kacey beauty dish, and to power my softboxes, but till now had not really used it too much. I put a couple flashes on it and pulled out a Bratz doll to experiment with. Basically I wanted something mobile with soft light and the ability to balance the sun.

I shot with a Metz 40MZ-3 and a Sony HVL-F58 AM, triggered with Skyports and shot through an Elinchrom Portalite box. It’s a very bare-bones box, no diffuser or baffle on the inside, so it won’t block too much light like another box would. It’s also very light and packs up into almost nothing, very portable.

The two flashes give you enough power if you need it, but also the ability to dial the power down if desired. The Sony goes down to 1/32 and the Metz to 1/256. Ideally I would add a battery pack to not worry about recycle times, but that’s another purchase.