The Tanager Blog

It’s amazing how one piece of gear can reacquaint you with your creativity.

For about three months now, I’ve been comparison shopping for another light source. My system is great, and its well on its way, but I felt like I was coming up short with my indoor work. I shoot with a Canon 40D (which has a built-in flash I never use, for good reason), I have two prime lenses (a 50mm and 24mm, great for available light, but they have their limits) and a Speedlight 580EXII. This last one is an external flash, and its good, but somewhat limiting. Flashes from the top of a camera cast light from an angle that often looks flat. So while under the influence of the Strobist blog, I decided to get a flash off my camera and start playing with light.

So why did I end up buying this beast: the ABR800? A ring flash that mounts around the lens of the camera? Well, needless to say, I got sidetracked. And needless to say, this thing is killer cool.

For one, ring flashes are often used for fashion photography because they cast light from the same angle as the lens, meaning minimal shadows, and skin tones that look great. Plus, it creates a circular catch light in the model’s eyes (click the image above and you can see the ring flash reflected in Hailey’s eyes).

Enough technical stuff. The package arrived Thursday and it took me three hours over the course of two nights to get the light, the light stand, the mount and the “moon unit” (a 30-inch diffuser) set up.

But by Saturday, I was getting the hang of it, and in early evening before we started cooking some din-din, Hailey and I experimented in the living room for an hour or two.

The first few set-ups have a bit of a hard edge to them. Bright highlights, rich colors…much of that has to do with our living room, which is painted bright red.

But it can also be toned down to cast a softer light (which will be great for kid portraits and weddings) and it can be triggered remotely by my Speedlight flash. In this shot below, we had the ring flash on a tripod to my right and the Speedlight angled up and behind me. This alone makes the ring flash pretty darn versatile for studio and portable studio work.

Could this be the equivalent of the boot shot for the ring flash?

I also gave backlighting a try, but this will need more practice. Below is Hailey in front of the ring flash as its triggered. She moves in mysterious ways…

With the camera mounted back through the ring flash, we decided to pretend we’re cool with our cheap sunglasses and ooo and ahh the catch light in our lenses. Take 1:

Take 2: check out that big ol’ moon unit in our lenses.

Next up….results of the food photography experiment with the ring flash mounted off camera. Knives and a juicy tomato…will post it later this week.