It's not real, it's only a model.

I built this a while ago now, my brother got it me as a present. I've been off work ill today, so got bored and started playing around with my latest toy er... I mean 'lighting tool'. The Lastolite TriFlip 8:1

What you will need in order to recreate this image is as follows;


- 1 dusty model of a Kawasaki zx10r (nothing else will do)
- 1 ridiculously messy dining room (or other totally unsuitable space)
- 1 overpriced trigrip reflector (or white bed sheet)
- 1 overpriced lumiquest softbox (or make your own cardboard softbox)
- 1 reasonably priced 12" silver reflector (or tin foil)
- 2 flash units
- 1 very expensive lightstand (or a nice friend prepared to stand perfectly still for hours while holding a flash unit)
- Wireless trigger system (or optical trigger system, depending on your flashes. I use Nikon SB800's)
- other bitz n bobz I've already forgotten I used...

I'm using the trigrip as both a diffuser and a table here, so I can light the underside giving an even shadowless (nearly) finish. The flash unit underneath is placed directly under the bike, about 2ft away. This makes the light fall off into the distance, giving a greyness to the background higher up the image.
I placed the softbox above and slightly behind the bike and used the little reflector to bounce some of the light into the shadows on the front of the bike.

I'm a newcomer to this, so there are probably (definitely) better ways of doing this sort of photography. This is just how I hashed mine together on a whim after seeing another overpriced gadget from Lastolite, and thinking "hmm...I wonder if I can do that?"

Today, while shooting alpacas, I met a woman who told me about a trip to China she took as a teenager with a group of fellow cycling students, where her party came across a village deserted due to bubonic plague, complete with dead bodies. She honestly believed that she wasn't going to get out of there alive...

Well, I'm not quite that ill, but I have though been feeling a little off colour, a tummy bug me thinks. I blame it on all the schools I've been in recently. I don't think there has been a day gone by for 2 weeks when I haven't spent some time in a school with those little dwarf-like plague-carrying humans they call 'children'.

I'm not quite sick enough to take time off work, but just sick enough to make it a hindrance. My mind has not been fully on my photography, and I've struggled when trying anything taxing. But despite the grumbly-in-the-tumbly I've managed a couple of good photos today which has cheered me up a little.

One was a funny picture of the alpacas, the other was a portrait of a hairdresser who had just returned from London where she had spent the last 3 1/2 yrs styling the hair of celebrities like Sharon Stone. While trying to get her to smile for the birdie (while all my equipment was failing around me - which reminds me, gotta charge a load of batteries) she says "I hate my teeth"...Well, I wasn't quite sure what she wanted me to do about it. Lend her mine? Believe you me, that would have looked a lot worse! I couldn't see anything wrong with hers, so I told her to keep smiling and we got the picture.

Did someone say bad teeth?