Published - Orbis Ring Flash Website Gallery

Ever heard of FlickR? If you haven't you're missing out. Unlike any other site, its simplicty to share photographs, gain exposure the world over and meet interesting new people is unrivalled. Flickr bridges new career gaps from amateur to professional photographers, and it's not uncommon to read how the photographers you admire today, started off uploading on FlickR. Following on from an earlier post about my Orbis Ring flash, James Madelin (creator of the Orbis) spotted my photograph in the Orbis FlickR group and was impressed with it's originality. As such James has now asked to display it on the OrbishFlash.com website. Excellent!

FlickR isn't just a website, it's a community of photographers ranging from the weird, to the down right brilliant. It is full of inspiration, ideas and new techniques to help move your photography to the next level.

For those who haven't, feel free to check out my FlickR account here and if you like, add me as a contact! :)

Photoshoot - Andrew Johnson

From one creative medium to the next, Andrew Johnson is an extremely talented and young animator. One of his short films has been selected to be aired outside on a large screen in Middlesbrough as part of the BBC's displaying young talent, and as such Andrew approached me in the need of a headshot. With very little time to shoot and process the final shot (4 hours!) we had our work cut out. Inside a nearby office block, we produced your standard headshot. Although, not wanting to miss an opportunity we worked on some different ideas using the surroundings (plus, it was an opportunity to use my orbis and with plenty of white wall space, the honlphoto gels!)

The Orbis really excelled off camera, acting as a fill-light source on a low power for most of my shots. For a gallery containing some of Andrew's shoot, feel free to click here. His brilliant short film entitled 'The Stalking' can be seen here via his website and I highly recommend you take a look.

Kit Bag - Orbis Ring Flash

Orbis is a quarterly American journal on international relations and U.S. foreign policy... Wikipedia is wrong, it's an awesome light modifier :) Damien Lovegrove has recently written a few blog posts about the so called 'Orbis Ring Flash', and given the results he has produced with the 'one size fits all' ring flash, curiousity got the better of me. I purchased one through his site and within 24 hours its sat on my desk infront of me as I write this post.

The idea of the ring flash is to create even, simple shadowless light and as such is commonly used in high-end fashion/portrait magazine photography. Designed to fit to your existing speedlites the Orbis is affordable and well built using mirrored prism reflectors to produce even light. The unique way a ring flash renders light produces a distinctive shadowy halo around the subject.

Typical ring flashes are attached to the end of the lens, but with this being off-camera (and fully compatible with ETTL systems) it has greater versatility, for example acting as a small off camera beauty dish/softbox or fill light. Can't wait to try this out!