Rick Nunn

You know it’s been nearly 10 months since I did my How I Shoot: Lowkey Portrait, what a slacker I am. Life just gets in the way sometimes… you know? But yeah, a new How I Shoot — ooh ooh exciting isn’t it. So this time I wanted do to an article that explained how I mix daylight with strobes.

Exactly two years ago today I bought my first real camera — a Canon 450D. I’d played with cameras a bit in the past but didn’t really have a clue what I was doing. I already had it in my head that I wanted to do a ThreeSixFive project, mainly to keep the camera in my hand and learn at a pretty decent rate.

I’m at a really strange place with photography right now. I feel very lost; I don’t know what I am doing or where I am going with it. It’s been bothering me for weeks — I don’t have any direction & people seem hell bent on making it into work for me. I didn’t get into photography for financial gain or acclaim. I got into it so I would have a free, relaxed, creative outlet outside of the design world in which I work. I am more than happy being a designer for my day job & I don’t feel I need or want photography to enter into that.

Long time coming right? Yeah, but it’s here now so shush your mouth! I want to start fairly simple, something that anyone getting into the strobist side of photography could achieve with some pretty basic kit. Lowkey sprung to mind straight away — It’s easy to do with a single light & you can use just about any lens, especially since we don’t need to take advantage of a wide (low) aperture for a shallow depth of field. Oh also — I’ve done a video of the whole thing. It’s at the end of this post, it’s very amateur but maybe it will help you out… if not you can at least laugh at me!

You might already know all about histograms, if don’t it’s well worth getting your head around them because, well, they are pretty awesome. Unfortunately they are often overlooked, dismissed or misunderstood but they are very helpful especially when it comes to strobist photography.