Hartsord's Random Stabs in the Dark

090628_Agent_8_18 , originally uploaded by Hartsord . Figurines are some of my favorite subjects for photography, since I can bring them out anytime, with little fuss or set-up. This figurine is Agent 8, from The Adventures of Spawn. She's about 8 inches tall, and comes with a base (although I didn't use it for this photo.) The set-up for this shot is similar to my set-up for the Hitman shot: the background is the same sheet of black felt paper, to absorb the stray light. I laid it on top of the bed, and stuck the back part to the wall with a small piece of blu-tack. The figurine wouldn't stand properly on the bed, so I slipped my macbook pro under the feltpaper to serve as a stand for the figure. I also had to adjust the position of her gun a bit to get her to balance correctly. I also took the opportunity to replace the battery of my Sekonic lightmeter. I set my Vivitar 285HV to 1/16 (the lowest setting), and took a reading of the light on her face, getting f/16 at ...

Last issue , I blogged that I had just gotten my new Cactus V4 triggers from Gadget Infinity . If you're interested in seeing what it looks like, you can check out that entry. For this entry however, I'll be writing about my initial review of its performance. As I've previously mentioned, I was previously using the Cactus V2s triggers (also from GI) to fire my flashes off-camera, but their performance was short of spectacular. I had to mod the antenna on the transmitter (to increase the range and reliability), and mod a 1/8" jack to the receiver (again, to improve reliability). Don't get me wrong, I've had a lot of success using them, but I had to put in quite an amount of work to get to that level. So now, with the new V4 triggers, I was hoping that their performance would be much better than that of the V2s transmitters. After setting up the V4 triggers (pretty straightforward, did not even have to read the manual), first thing I did is to attach my Sigm...