365/47 Cheap Sunglasses

When you wake up in the morning and the light is hurt your head

The first thing you do when you get up out of bed

Is hit that streets a-runnin' and try to beat the masses

And go get yourself some cheap sunglasses

Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah

ZZ Top, "Cheap Sunglasses"

Finally got around to setting up the charcoal background out in the garage. Easy-peasy. I don't have a proper background stand, so I had to MacGyver something together with some light stands, a paperclip, three oversized clamps, and something that looks almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a small badger. Ok, it was a dust bunny that had to be wiped off the steel bar I used as a cross piece.

One of the annoying things with doing self-portraits is that I don't have a good way to trigger the camera, so I have to rely upon the intervalometer at some randomly short duration and just fake it. I'm certainly getting better at judging where the right focal zone should be and striking a pose when the camera lamp flashy-things me right before the shutter clicks over. It would certainly be better if I could trigger the camera remotely when I wanted to.

But, that's just a minor gripe.

Tonight, I just needed something quick and easy, so I grabbed my wife's pink sunglasses. For some reason, I kept thinking that the ZZ Top song was about pink sunglasses. It bounced around in my head for a bit and every time it came up, pink kept getting inserted for cheap. Funny how your brain misremembers little things like that in songs.

Ended up with about 20 shots. I liked this one the most, although there's one photo where I'm vamping for the camera. It's like Buddy Christ was being channeled through me and straight into the camera. No, seriously. I had the cheesy thumbs up, finger point, grin, and all. But you won't be seeing that photo. No, really, you won't.

This was a simple setup: one light, SB-900 at 1/16th power, shot through a 15" Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe about 4 feet away and off at a 45 degree angle to camera left. It's about 5 feet off the ground. All triggered via pocket wizard.

Oh, and to top it off, I finally figured out why my SB-900 was letting the first image always get cut off with the black band when shooting at the highest sync speed: the damn thing kept falling asleep between each series of photos! The first one was the only one doing it. I guess when I'm doing full-manual mode with the pocket wizards, the flash is timing out due to inactivity. I never noticed it when running with CLS because the flash just stayed on. I must have set up my SB-800's to never fall asleep (or at least wait for a few minutes), which is why I don't recall ever seeing this problem with them.

Go figure. Learn something new every day.

Until then ... go get yourself some pink, err, cheap sunglasses.