Photography by Ricky Refuerzo

OMG! I did not post here for a week, that only means that I didn’t shoot any event for a week. Anyways, since I have all the time to spare, I attended the first PiPho Strobist EB, PiPho what?! OK let me define those three alien words. Firstly, PiPho is a forum that I’ve been actively participating, it is short for Pinoy Photography & the participants are normally called as PiPhols, makes sense? Secondly, the word strobist, it’s a lighting technique that maximize the use of a flashgun (or speedlite or speedlight), this technique uses the speedlights in exchange of the bulky studio lights. And finally, EB simply means eye-ball or meet up.

It was held at the Cordillera Coffee within the Vargas Museum of the University of the Philippines, Diliman Campus. Rench (sorry but I only know their forum nicks) started the EB with a review of the lighting principle & the basic strobist technique.

Then Hartsord discussed about the lighting modifiers, mostly DIY’s (Do-it-yourself).


It’s now time to shoot! We were divided into groups, some were grouped based on the lighting knowledge level & some have the same gear set-up. I went along with the Nikon CLS group, this is a good excuse for not having the wireless triggers. I’ll discuss what CLS is all about in my future posts.

Here I tried the Rim Lighting technique, if you will look closely on the picture you will notice the light on the edge of the subject. This is a 2 strobes set-up, 1 was place at the back of the subject at full flash power & one in front (slightly angled towards camera left) at 1/2 flash power. ISO was set at 200,shutter speed at 1/200 & aperture at f8.

To achieve this highlight (camera left) & shadow (camera right) effect, the strobe that was placed on camera left was at 1/2 flash power & 1/4 power on the right, this in turn would give the 1:2 flash power ratio. ISO was set at 100,shutter speed at 1/200 & aperture at f8.

It was another worthwhile EB for PiPho, I salute Rench for starting this, till the next meet-up.

This post is tagged Events, Photo Ops, Photography, Strobist