Day 264

264/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

A while ago I got myself a Kodak Brownie Holiday Flash camera...  

...but I never shoot with it. I've only shot one roll, and I was really happy with the results, but it's rare that I break it out. It shoots a weird film size (127) that's hard to find, expensive, expensive to develop, and even more expensive to scan. 12 pictures will end up costing you about $25. But I think it's beautiful, and I love looking at it, so normally I keep it hanging on my wall. Plus it's a decade older then my dad, so it's a conversation piece.


For some reason I felt like giving it some love today. The light outside, however, is less than ideal today, so I figured I'd take a picture of the camera instead of taking one with it. I set it down on a side table, dust and all, and set up this shot. The table gave me a nice brown base, and I pulled it far enough from the wall so that I could get a blurred, fairly uniform background. I wanted the camera to look crisp, so I set up my 430ex II as a kick light. I generally keep an Omni Bounce on it, so the light is soft but not too soft. The Omni Bounce controls the light that hit my back wall too, making it soft and even. I synced the flash with that cheap cord that I'm in love with, which made dialing in my light levels a breeze. Then, because I am lazy and didn't want to set up another stand/flash/sync, I grabbed a bounce card, which let me do this picture with one light. I set the card up on the opposite side of the camera and wrapped it around the front, so the whole thing looked like this:




The flash gave the Brownie a nice rim light, separating it from the background. Then the light bounced off of the card to fill in the front and the dark side of the camera, giving me a simple, clean set-up. And that thing drooping into the top of the frame is my sync cable, which stretches out to about 10 feet long. It took all of 5 minutes to set up, shoot, and tear down, and I'm really happy with how the picture turned out!