On the strobist discussion group on flickr another assignment was set; a macro picture. No further restrictions except for the use of off-camera flash. For those of you that haven’t found strobist yet; it’s an amazing site about the use of off-camera lighting for photo shoots.

My idea was to capture 2 of my toy soldiers in a battle. Creating the battle effect proved very difficult. I wanted to create some smoke but unfortunatly smoke doesn’t come in scale variants. Therefore I got just whisps of smoke which is, by the way, also an intersting subject to shoot, I included some shots of smoke only as well. At first I used incense but later on switched to baby oil and a soldering iron. To tell you the truth, I don’t know which smell is worse but with the baby oil there at least was more smoke. Maybe someday will visit the local hobby shop to get some of the stuff they use for model railroads to create smoke.

For this assignment I used my Metz 50Mz5 and Metz 54Mz3 with 3080 shoe. No wireless trigger yet so I set the shutter speed to 1 sec and manually fired the 50Mz, causing the 54Mz to follow. I stopped down both flashes with white depron, there was just to much light even with the flashes at the lowest level. Do not(!) shoot full power into depron because it will melt…
For the flash facing the soldiers I created a sorta gobo from black depron to get more light on their faces.
Further there was just a black cardboard background, my tripod and camera.