Alien Bees vs. Nikon's SB900: Engagement Session at Toronto's Waterfront with Stephanie and Rene

It's been awhile since I last posted here but I had a few good reasons to keep me away from the computer. First of all, I got married shortly after shooting Angela and Sunny's wedding and then it got real hectic moving out of my place and moving in with my wife. After the dust had settled I had multiple shoots week after week, so I had been slacking off on my blogging duties for the technical aspects of my shots.

Stephanie and Rene's engagement session was long overdue as our schedules didn't coincide for the longest time. I decided to bring as much gear as I could in order to get the shots that I wanted. Little by little I've perfected my "equipment carrying" technique to the point that I can take a Vagabond II, a B1600, a 13' heavy duty light stand, a 22" Beauty Dish or Octabox depending on the location or effect I'm looking for, three (3) SB-800s and one (1) SB-900, two (2) more smaller light stands, two (2) dual purpose umbrellas, Pocket Wizards, Camera body and three lenses all by my lonesome. More often than not, the convenience of the Speedlights wins over the power of the B1600, but there are times where the SB-900 is not enough to overpower the sun.

Here's a clear example:
While I like this frame, it's clearly underexposed in comparison to the background and for a good reason, I was shooting straight into the sun. I had the SB-900 on camera set to Manual and at full power.


I took a few more frames using the Sb-900 but I made sure I had the sun coming from the side, as opposed to trying to overpower it. This made it a lot easier to underexpose the ambient, as seen here.


or here


I still wanted to have a dramatic sunset as a background so it was time for the B1600 to shine, triggered via PWs and set to 1/4 power. Believe it or not, at 1/2 power it was blowing out the highlights for my subjects:

In this image the 22" beauty dish was powered via a Vagabond II and set at camera left at approximately 45 degrees:


Same setups, with closer crops:




As you can see, the B1600 is very good for those times when you need raw wattage. However, when the sun settles and the ambient light starts to disappear, an SB-900 is more than enough to get the job done, as evidenced in this image:

The setup for this one was as simple as it gets: one (1) Sb-900 on a translucent umbrella set to TTL EV -0.3 triggered via CLS positioned at camera left.

Using Strobist Techniques for Tricky Lighting at Weddings

This past Friday (July 3, 2009) I shot a wedding at The Berkeley Church in Toronto. The location is beyond great for wedding photography, as it's an 1800s restored church turned into a banquet hall/event venue. The place where the couple held their wedding ceremony is lined with stained glass windows which created severe backlighting. The challenge was in lighting the couple without having the flash wash out the whole scene and killing the light coming through the windows. After trying a few setups a couple of hours before the actual ceremony, I finally settled on an SB-800 fitted with a HONL Speed Grid. positioned at 25-30 degrees camera right, triggered via Nikon's CLS. Here are a few of the resulting images:

Converting your WordPress site for the Iphone using WPTouch Plugin

I had initially mentioned on this blog a website called Mofuse as a very reliable tool to make your website iPhone and mobile friendly. Well, as good as the Mofuse site is, I was restricted in the number of pages available for viewing other than the posts. That meant that potential clients could only read my posts but couldn't get any other info about the company and pricing info. Enter the WPTouch plugin for Wordpress, which ports your entire Blog, including additional pages for contact info and pricing, to a mobile friendly presentation.

Check them out, they are definitely worth a try.

Classic Black & White Portraits in Toronto

The countdown is on for our own wedding next Friday, July 10. This past Sunday I had the chance to take a few shots of my future bride, Miriam, and her family. Thanks to the amazing features found in Nik's Silver Efex Pro I was able to process the RAW file for this image to get the initial B&W tones, which was culminated with good old dodging and burning in Photoshop CS4 to give the various gradations of light on Miriam's face.

SEO Optimization for Photographers and Bloggers in General Part 2

If you want to learn more about submitting your Blog to blog directories, creating sitemaps for Google and other search engines, and other important topics related to search engine optimization, then I highly recommend you go to this site:



The articles are very easy to read and the explanations are quite detailed.

SEO Optimization for Photographers and Bloggers in General Part 1

After spending countless hours tweaking and messing around with code for both my blogs/sites (this one and juanrojophotography.com), I've picked up a few URLs where you can go to take bits of code and paste into your own. It really don't requires any understanding of programming, you just have to follow the instructions given on the site and you'll be on your way. This is one of those URLs:

This Link gives you a tutorial on how to change the title of your post to appear as the main title of the page. By the default, when you first setup your Blogger blog, the title for your blog appears on every single page, even for archived posts and to top it off it's placed right in front of the post title. From a search engine stand point this is supposed to be quite counterproductive for your search engine rankings, as Google or any other search engine for that matter will only pick up a limited amount of words from the title to index it. If a good chunk of that title is already taken over by the Blog's name, then your post might go unnoticed by Google as the title of the blog has already been indexed by Google.

Juan Rojo Photography Now Has its Own Website

In order to differentiate a little bit more the technical aspect of this blog from my wedding photography business, I decided to create a separate site altogether. The new Site will concentrate exclusively on displaying images for my clients and hopefully attract new ones, as well via search engine queries or by referrals. The technical geeky side of lighting with detailed Strobist descriptions will remain an integral part of this blog. In other words, if you are another photographer like myself, you want to keep reading this one.

Here's a shot of my new site. Not very fancy at all, but I built it using WordPress focusing more on search engine optimization rather than aesthetics. If you still want to see a better looking website, you can go Here