Garage Studio Shoot
After much chin scratching and review reading I've bought the Lastolite Lumen8 F400 studio flash kit, with 2 umbrellas, a 90x 90cm soft box and a radio trigger. They get consistantly good reviews and the web site is very helpful with many video tutorials.
My first project is to photograph a carbon bicycle frame for one of Paul's customer's who is updating and upgrading his web site. I've done some pictures before for him showing before and after carbon frame repairs recorded on a previous blog. I started off with a black bacground and really liked the shapes.
I was using just the 90cm soft box and had the frame suspended on fishing line from the ceiling with a black fleece background. I pieced all the kit together, the radio trigger was a delight to use and reduces risks of trips eliminating the need for sync cables. The garage was ideal for eliminating unwanted light and reflections on the shiney black frame.
I changed to the blue/grey background to show the frame edges better. These are the same polystyrene blocks that I'd painted for the original coffee morning shoot, which seems ages ago.The soft box gave great reflections on the frame and I set an aperture of f4.5 to lose the background. ISO 200 and 1/125sec.
This is one of the unedited shots. This frame is special because it was previously owned by Christoph Sauser the Swiss mountain bike champion and has his name on it. It had been broken and repaired.
These are the edited shots with the background lines and string removed. Resized to the corect dimensions for the web site. 
The page ends up looking like this.
Of course with all this new kit I couln't resist doing some flower spirals.
Great to see you do this stuff, it looks very professional. My lad Tom does the downhill bike racing a images of bikes. he does work for the web site "Pinkbike", but these are very good.I like the way you use yourback drops as well. I am inspired to go out and buy some.
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