Toronto Wedding and Portrait Photographer: Nikon SB-900 with 1/8 HONL Speed Grid

As promised, here are some of the shots taken with the HONL 1/8 Speed Grid, attached to an SB-900. The speed grid serves no other purpose than to concentrate the beam of light to create more dramatic lighting, as opposed to spilling light everywhere. In these photos, the speedlight was aimed at the model's face, the ambient light was reduced and the flash was set to TTL with a flash exposure comp of -0.7. The SB-900 was triggered using an SB-800 on camera.

Dramatic Lighting Using the HONL Grids and Nikon's CLS

Imagine if you came home and this was the scene waiting for you. You don't know who this person is, but he clearly knows who you are, and took the time to carefully break into your apartment, and now is waiting for you at your table.



The idea here is simple, the dramatic mood of the scene is provided courtesy of some dramatic lighting, which was created with the help of HONL's Speed Grids. I had both Speedlights (SB-900 and SB-800) placed at camera left. The SB-900 had the 1/8 speed grid on and was pointed down at the subject, and set to -1.7EV via the on-camera SB-800. The SB-800 had the 1/4 speed grid on and was pointed at the table, set to -2.3EV, just enough to see a bit of the table. You can see the setup shot here:



The RAW file was converted to TIF via Capture NX, with additional use of Nik's Color Efex Pro 3.0.