Alasdair is a friend of mine who is leaving the shores of New Zealand to spend a few years living back in his homeland of whisky, tartan skirts and roasted sheep’s guts; yip, he’s heading to Scotland. I caught up with Alasdair for a beer before he headed off and took the opportunity to take some urban portraits while we were out.

We stopped for a beer at His Lordships – a really neat little place in SOL square, which is styled as a historic English pub. SOL Square is one of the collections of lane-ways within Christchurch that has been gentrified. These areas makes for great photographs and I have blogged about similar urban portraits that I have taken here before.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/2.8, 1/160. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/3.2, 1/200. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/3.2, 1/200. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/3.2, 1/200. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/3.2, 1/200. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/3.2, 1/200. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/3.2, 1/200. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/3.2, 1/200. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/3.2, 1/200. Ambient light only.

EF50mm f/1.4 lens at ISO250, f/1.6, 1/400. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO800, f/3.2, 1/200. Ambient light only.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO400, f/4, 1/400. Ambient light only.

Lets add some light…

Alasdair is into his photography, and was asking me about using flash. I decided to show him a quick example of what we can do when we add some light into the mix. For the two images below, I have used an on-board Canon 580 exII flash.  I underexposed the ambient light -  in this case by about 3.5 stops. Underexposing the ambient has caused the background to go dark, whilst, Alasdair is lit by the light bouncing off the wall.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO100, f/4, 1/200. 580exII Flash bounced.

For this simple example I have used the speedlight in ETTL (auto) mode, and I have bounced the flash off the wall directly to camera left. By Using ETTL I have allowed the camera to make its best judgement on how much flash to throw out. For bouncing flash like this I would normally use ETTL, as the parameters – such as subject to distance and distance from the wall can easily change, and the ETTL settings will do their best to adjust.

EF28-70mm f/2.8 L lens at ISO100, f/4, 1/200. 580exII Flash bounced.