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My friends and I went to Putra­jaya Flo­ria 2010 for pho­to­shoot­ing. How­ever, the sky was cloudy and every­thing was dull.

With­out much pic­tures taken, we decided to leave. Just when we were walk­ing towards the car, we saw this spec­tac­u­lar view.

Well, I def­i­nitely didn’t expect to return with any good pic­ture that day. While this shot turns out to be quite good.

Pic­ture taken with my new ultra wide angle lens Tok­ina 11–16mm, post-processed in Photoshop.

I shot a bear. Not a real bear but a big, soft and fluffy teddy bear.

In order to learn how to use the new Nikon Speed­light SB-900, I did some quick setup in the liv­ing room and shot some pic­tures of a teddy bear I bor­rowed from Kevin.

It was my first time shoot­ing with a remote speed­light through an umbrella. My setup was fairly sim­ple and clas­sic — white back­ground, speed­light on the right and a reflec­tor on the left.

Bed­sheet as the back­ground, remote speed­light on the right and white card­board as the reflec­tor on the left.

First few shots were all fail­ures as I have no idea how to make use of a remote speed­light. After exper­i­ment­ing for while, things started to become clear.

Exper­i­ment with remote speed­light. Fail fail fail fail.

I then started to exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent light­ing. First I took a few shots with­out the umbrella just to see what’s the outcome.

Left: Speed­light from 45 degrees. Right: Speed­light from approx­i­mately 22 degrees.

Like what I’ve expected, direct speed­light pro­duced harsh shad­ows which is not what I wanted.

After that, I put on the shoot-through umbrella and tried posi­tion the speed­light from dif­fer­ent directions.

Left: Speed­light from the top. Right: Speed­light from 45 degrees.

Speed­light from the top over­ex­posed the hair while Speed­light from 45 degrees evenly exposed the sub­ject, but in-turn, mak­ing it looks flat.

I then pushed the speed­light a lit­tle bit fur­ther to approx­i­mately 22 degrees from the sub­ject and sud­denly the shadow between the hair gave the teddy bear more con­trast, depth and tex­tures as you can see from the pic­ture below.

Final shot with speed­light com­ing from 22 degrees from the subject.

I set­tled with this pic­ture and brought it into Pho­to­shop for post pro­cess­ing. After back­ground removal, colour bal­ance, level adjust­ment, increase con­trast and some other touch-ups, I finally have my final image.

I’ve learned a lot dur­ing the process espe­cially in set­ting the back­ground. Firstly, using a cloth as the back­ground pro­duced a lot of unwanted shadow which makes it dif­fi­cult to remove it in post. Sec­ondly, I should’ve used another reflec­tor to lighten up the back­ground so that shad­ows can be reduced.

It’s not per­fect but I think I’m happy with what I got from my first attempt at flash photography.

Last year today, I bought my Nikon D90. One year into pho­tog­ra­phy has been a great jour­ney. I really enjoyed the ride.

A year later, I decided to add 2 more items to my col­lec­tion, a speed­light and an ultra wide angle lens.

Left, Nikon SB-900 Speed­light and right, Tok­ina SD 11-16mm F2.8 DX.

After I bought them, I went to Pavil­ion to do some test shoots.

A shot of Pavil­ion Kuala Lumpur and the fountain.

This Tok­ina lens is just incred­i­ble. The pic­tures came out ultra sharp with high con­trast even though they were shot handheld.

Another shot of Pavil­ion Kuala Lumpur and the fountain.

Even though I own the lens for less than a day, I already start lov­ing it. Can’t wait to play with the speed­light soon.