My Gear - Accessories

There a few accesories that I use apart from my camera and lenses, depending on the situation.


I have a Canon 430EX II Speedlite Flash Unit, which I use combined with a Flash Diffuser (from ebay for about 5 dollars - just search speedlite flash diffuser) for events. I also use this combined with imitation pocket wizards (also ebay for about 50 dollars - search wireless flash) and a strobist umbrella kit (digitalcamerawarehouse.com.au search strobist kit) for external lighting in portrait, fashion, commercial and musician shoots. Having a speedlite flash with a diffuser is great for softer portraits in dark situations, like this:


The on-camera flash is quite harsh and is sometimes just not powerful enough. I strongly recommend and external flash unit like the 430EX that can have its head rotated for bouncing both through the diffuser and off walls and objects.Shooting the flash externally with wireless connectors is a brilliant way to get a much more professional looking photograph, like the one following which was taken for a 'no water sucks' photo competiton. A flash was placed at camera left and balanced with ambient light to create a more striking portrait of my thirsty dog.


External flash can seem difficult and a bit of a hassle, but there is a brilliant resource on the net to help you through at strobist.blogspot.com. I haven't had a great deal of experience with it yet, but will keep you updated on lighting set ups for any future shots involving external flash that I put up.

Another lighting accessory that I use is a 5-in-1 reflector, easily gettable off ebay for a lot cheaper than what you would find in a store.


The reflector includes white, silver and gold reflective circles, a white diffuse-through circle and a black light block circle. I mainly use the gold and silver reflector for a subtle way to seperate the subject from a background, and the white reflector for lighting up harsh shadows. These are great! Here is an example of a portrait lit with the gold reflector, subtle but effective:


Like every photographer should, I have a tripod. I was using a cheap 20 dollar one for about 2 months, but it was terribly affected by wind and not very versatile in terms of possible leg positions, important when you need that perfect angle. I grabbed a Velbon tripod for about 200 dollars, and have never looked back. It stands up to very strong winds, but more important it has free legs - each leg has the ability to move independently and almost to horizontal. This is an extremely important consideration to make when you're getting a tripod - when you're shooting shots somewhere like a waterfall or creek, you'll need the versatility. I'd post the exact specs and a photo but in the end, if you buy something above about 100 dollars that has free legs, you can't go wrong.

Together with my tripod, I use a canon remote shutter release:
You can also buy wireless remotes for similar prices, but for some reason i've always liked having the cord. These are about 35 dollars, or probably something like 7 for an off brand one on ebay. Although you can effectively take shots on a tripod using the self-timer, it's so much easier to just have this so you don't have to wait 3 seconds before each shot takes. It might not sound like much but it might be the thing that makes you miss a huge lightning strike, or firework burst. Another crucial feature is that it allows shots to be taken longer than the camera's preset 30 seconds. This is great for shooting in areas of extremely low light, especially when a narrow aperture is needed. This might just be my favourite accessory, I would hate shooting landscapes without it!

I have two netural density graduated filters, and one neutral density filter. These are rectangular, and supposed to be mounted onto an adaptor at the front of a lens like this:

I find the adaptor cumbersome and annoying, so I usually just manually hold the filter or filters in front of the lens myself. I absolutely love these filters for landscape shooting, especially the ND grads. They start dark at the top and gradually change to clear at the bottom:


This helps even out a bright sky and dark ground, and creates stunning landscape shots. Most of my favourite landscape shots have been done using this technique, like this one:

Check out this page for a good run through of using these.

The only disadvantage is that these plastic ones tend to give a slight purple tinge to the top half of the photo. This can usually be edited out on photoshop. Sometimes like this photo though, it works out perfect!

The accessories you choose to get should be based on what you shoot, or what you want to shoot. In my opinion, the speedlite and tripod are definitely the most important out of all of these. If you are keen on landscapes, the cable release and the ND grads are great. If you are keen on portraits or fashion, reflectors and external flash accessories are worth a look. These are all pretty basic accessories - there's plenty of info on the net if you want to get even more funky!

Cheers
Tal