Out to the lake to conquer the afternoon sun! The header image of my wonderful wife was taken around 2pm under a cloudless sky. We hauled some of our new photo gear out to the lake and set it up to see if it would do what I'd hoped it would -- overpower mid-day sunlight for a very dramatic, contrasty look. I set up a Matthews combo stand and hooked up a 40" Kupo grip arm to it. A Mola Demi 22" beauty dish was fitted to the end of the grip arm and an Einstein monobloc was fitted to the back of the dish. I slapped a Hoya variable neutral density filter onto the 70-200mm lens and tried some shots at f2.8. They turned out great... The background fell away into a smooth blur with some amazing bokeh from the sun sparkles on the water.
The 24-70mm lens went on for some wider shots, including the one used as the header for this blog post. I stopped the aperture down to about f16 and did a little fiddling with the neutral density filter to get the light dialed in just right. It turns out the Einstein has just enough power at 640 watt seconds to cope with having the sun in the frame.
All in all, I'd call it a very successful test of the Demi, Einstein, stand and variable ND filter. I'm looking forward to using the Demi again this afternoon for an indoor shoot with friend, model and fellow photograher, Jeska Bailey.