Cocktails and Glamour: First Make Up Bar Shoot

So, do to the overwhelming popularity of the Housewives of Atlanta, my brother and sister through my wife and ourselves decided to try our hands at hosting a make-up bar.  With my brother and sister's make up line as the showcase we had a small gathering of about 15 women come together, get made over, and had a very brief photoshoot with yours truly.  Since weddings is my main thing, I had to rig some stuff together to make it work, and honestly, some equipment additions are sorely needed.  We had no remotes o we had to slave everything using bounced on camera flash.  no boom stand so my spouse had to hand hold some of the lighting as well as contribute to most of the creative ideas.  Lighting consisted of one Alien Bees ABR800 with small moon unit [off camera] as main and key light, and two bare White Lightning X1600's rear and to the sides providing some very uncontrollable rim lighting.  I cursed alot in my mind as flash slaves didn't see the on camera flash.  I prefer a narrower depth of field so I tend to use ND filters to open up more, but I've only gotten one for the new kit [77mm for the 70-200], so when switching lenses, I'd often forget to close my aperture down to F14-16.  Anyway, here are a few sample shots.

Annie and Kevin Wedding

This is the first wedding shot with the new rig.  My wife was given the task of using the D90 setup and we rented from www.cameralensrentals.com in order to have a second rig.  The second rig cost us $255 and consisted of: a Nikon D300 body, a Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 AFS VR, a Nikon 17-55 f/2.8, and a Nikon SB-600.

This is our first experience capturing a wedding with hispanic culture along with african american culture.  The people were very nice and accommodating with us and made us feel as part of the family attending the wedding not hired help.  A great experience!  What I realized I missed after the gels I used to have to balance the on camera strobes with the available light source.  So here are some sample shots. 

PS, I apologize that the post is kinda from end to beginning, but what's done is done.

Cousin Jennifer who wants to be a plus-sized model...

First assignment. I'd had my gear for about 2 days and got to at least try them out in a manner beyond shooting things randomly in my home. So, here are the results:

New Rig!!!

さしぶり、ね！

After having my equipment displaced, I finally have a new system. It took a long time for the home owner's claim to go through, but Liberty Mutual valued my equipment very well. It was very tedious going through the process of starting from nil to acquire at least the basics again [I had a very VERY high deductible]. When starting from scratch you have to face all these questions with less bias than you normally approach them since you aren't tied to a system:

Canon, Nikon, Sony, or other?

Full frame or crop?

New or used?

Get a few great items or a lot of mediocre items?

fixed vs zooms for certain needs?

What I eventually realized is that I need to figure out all over again what I want to do with my photography, which is little more than a hobby. Well, in a world where every guy who dreams of taking pictures of beautiful women goes out and grabs a D40 or a Rebel XT and calls themselves a professional... I decided to become a professional and eventual earn additional income using something that brings joy to my life. Once this decision was made, my choices seemed to limit themselves, then Photokina happened and brought more possibilities than you can shake a stick at. In the end I went with a system I feel is good enough for me to cover a wide range of needs at what seemed like the most economical cost. So here's the new rig:

Nikon D90 [body only]
Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 XR Di II LD
Tamron 70-200mm f2.8 Di LD (IF) macro
Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 AT-X Pro
Nikon SB-800

That's it, cover 35mm equivalent range of 16.5mm - 300mm, with a gap from 76mm - 104mm. This is a good enough kit to begin bringing in revenue, but here are the pro's and con's:

D90
Pro's: price [vs 50D, 5DmkII, D300], FPS decent enough, some controls easier to use than the D700's were, still has flash commander, movie mode allows additional creativity [vs 50D and D300], it's available now [vs the 5DmkII], the LCD is a step up [vs the D80], pixel sharpness and file size are better [vs 50D], uses SD cards which are cheaper, AF and metering better than predecessor.

Con's: Color and Luminance data not as appealing as the Canon line up, not as sharp as D300, slower AF than the competition, Less customizable body compared to competition, smaller body not as comfortable, not FX/FF, high ISo performance about 1 1/2 stops below the D700, viewfinder smaller than FX/FF bodies.

Tamron Lenses
Pro's: PRICE!!! Weight, and f/2.8 across the range

Con's: AF speed and accuracy, no VR in 70-200 [vs Nikon and Canon variants]. build quality poor.

Tokina Lens
Pro's: Fastest superwide available!!! Sharp!!! f/2.8 across the range and build quality rivals OEM lenses.

Con's: None, this is now my favorite lens. Some may say that the zoom range is not enough, but it's a superwide and the difference between 11 and 16mm's is more drastic than 200 and 300mm's.

SB800, quite simply the most bang for your buck flash around.

One day I would love to have the nikon variants of all the lenses save for the tokina, but the 2 tamron lenses are less than either of the Nikon counterparts.

So what's missing? At this point I only lack a couple things to make this a complete system and they are:

A portrait lens. Since I'm using crop sensor will probably get the Nikon 50mm f/1.4 AFS; would love an 85 1.4 but costs....
A macro lens. The Tamron's and Tokina's all focus extremely close. But I really would prefer a genuine macro like a 60mm or 105mm Nikon.