A top ten Olive Oil

I have friends working on many different things, and I’m fascinated by the fact that some of them have developed qualities and skills to create something different. Among them my friend Vicky, pure Tuscan breed, wonderful woman and energetic person.

She lives in a beautiful farm on the Tuscan hills, her husband takes care of the day to day business with agriculture, hunting and livestock and she pulled up her chemistry skills to create something pretty unique and ultimately extremely valuable, olive oil. Not the regular greenish liquid we use day after day. She created something special, THE olive oil, winner of many different award and most likely than not, one of the 10 best olive oil available in this planet.

I love olive oil; I use it a lot and appreciate a good one, even though I’m not an expert. Before opening the half litre bottle that Vicky gave me, I took my time to shoot some photos of it, trying to figure out all the things I have learnt from the book Light science & Magic.

One SB800 went behind a white translucent plastic panel and the other on top of the bottle through a Lastolite 40” Umbrella box. Two white reflectors helped distributing the light evenly and in Lightroom I just whitened the white and added a bit of contrast and sharpening.

I finally tried the oil with some good friends at home. It gave life to a good Turbot and Tuna Carpaccio, but to get the pure taste we had to put it as it is on fresh bread…. Is not cheap stuff, as you can imagine, but is truly worth a try. You can find it here Fattoria di Monti, and by the way, is a magnificent place to stay if you want to visit Tuscany; they rent a very nice house.

Metal Still Life

I studied THE BOOK “Light, Science and Magic” trying to understand the big deal of the Family of angles. Reflected and diffused light and did a bit of experiments

Using a black vinyl background and a metal lure can be a dangerous combination. I needed to keep the background black and make the lures shine, with a bit of reflection on the glossy plastic.

To achieve such result I used a combination of two lights, SB800 of course. One is bouncing the light off a big Lastolite 40” Umbrella box and the other one has an Orbis Ring Flash with it. Both light triggered with Nikon CLS.

First of all I made a sticky ball with duct tape to lift the jigs from the bottom. I put it in the back in order to achieve a bit of angle, reflect the light and show the length, height and width. Then I poured few drops of water to get more reflecting surface and decorate the image.

The Umbrella Box was placed 90º with the table. By doing so I had the light reflecting against the jigs but not the background that remained black. On the back of the jigs I had the other flash with the Orbis Ring to bring up the shadows a bit

Honestly, I love these still lives and will keep experimenting

Large diffusers, one more try

Today I wanted to give it a try to a new combo that I bought a while ago. Is a very large reflector, the Lastolite TriGrip and its specific bracket, that not only can support the diffuser but it also has an articulated arm to hold a flash to bounce the light off the diffuser.


It started as a stand alone test but whilst trying I decided to compare the results with another big Lastolite light modifier I got myself, the 1m Umbrella Box with 7mm shaft. They both are quite large light modifiers, at least for my minimalistic studio, among the largest I can deal with my small speed light.


The distance of the light from the subject is always the same. The shutter speed and f stop too, what I had to change a bit was the flash power rating in order to compensate the light absorption by each combination. For the sake of a comparison I also put a third image shot with a small LumiQuest Softobox III, of course the difference is staggering and is not fair to the little guy, but this is not what I wanted to prove, just to show how soft the light can be with a very large diffuser.

The fist image is shot with an SB800 at ¼ power bounced off a 1,20m Lastolite TriGrip on the Softsilver side (the other side is sunlite). As you can notice the light is extremely soft yet very scattered, with much diffused shadows, but quite poor in contrast. No reflector was used on the other side and in Lightroom I adjusted a bit the contrast, clarity and sharpening (the editing of the other image shave been synchronized with this on)

For this second take I used the Lastolite Umbrella Box. Same ratings as the previous image. The light is still soft and wrapping and the shadows less diffused. Due to the lesser spill of light the image is also a bit more contrast which I like a bit more. Being much closer to a softbox, with the Umbrella you have a better control over the light and it doesn’t scatter everywhere. I like this diffuser more and more

The third image shows how the light works when diffused by a small softbox. Imagine the difference in size from a 1,2 meters TriGrip, a 1 meter Umbrella and a 20cm softbox… Too much to handle.

In this final image you can see the TriGrip and the Umbrella Box together. Remember that the TriGrip is 1,2 meters, quite a huge thing, not too easy to handle and waaaaaay shaky on a light stand. I can see myself using it during one of my fishing trip and flying away with it like a kite surf at the first breeze. Thus, it can bounce the light over a standing subject and perfectly work as a fill light.

Lastolite Umbrella Box 40"

Lately I have red many good things about the Umbrellas with Diffusers so I decided to treat me to a brand new 40” Lastolite Umbrella Box. I had the choice for a larger one but I knew I couldn’t use it with small speed lights so I had to quit on the megalomaniac idea.

Kirk Tuck, in his latest book mentions a lot the Photek Umbrellas with diffusers, he suggest they can deliver a light almost as soft as a very expensive Octabank and uses a lot the 60” with Alien Bees or Profoto 600W lights. This is where I got the inspiration for my purchase and decided to give it a try the minimalistic way.

It would not be fair to say that I run a very extensive test, in fact I didn’t. Just put together a background, two stands and the D90 on a tripod to take some shots at my new baby reel, a Team Daiwa Bradia 2000, a tiny little jewel. I left the diffuser dome in the SB800 and had to pump it to ¼ power in manual and 200 ISO to achieve this f11 at 1/200 seconds. The Lastolite Umbrella Box was positioned right on top of the reel. The second light is an SB800 with diffuser dome on through a LumiQuest Softbox III, a small yet powerful light diffuser. This was feathered a bit towards the background and flagged with a small gobo to avoid light spill on the reel. The power of this light was set at 1/32. Both flashes have been triggered with Nikon CLS in separate groups

For the sake of it also have a look at how the light works with different modifiers. For the following images we got rid of the second light and just used the SB800 on top of the reel, see the difference:

SB800 with diffuser dome only

SB800 through LumiQuest Softbox III

SB800 through Lastolite Umbrella Box