I have been researching off-camera lighting for awhile now, and I finally received several pieces of equipment to make the job easier. My goal in getting my flash off my camera is that I wanted to be able to take some home portraits of the kids, and my 420ex mounted on top of my camera is just too restricting. After spending way too much time ready sites like the Strobist I finally have a decent setup. Keep in mind that I really did not want to spend much money on this setup, I was really looking for one of the cheapest ways I could get a setup that would allow me to take some portraits.

I ended up with a couple light stands, two 43″ Westcott umbrellas (one silver, one white), a Vivitar 285HV flash, and a set of the Cactus V2 remote triggers (also known as Ebay Triggers). I think I may end up getting another Vivitar or try to pickup a older Nikon flash on eBay, since I don't think my 420ex is going to do me much good off-camera. The issue with the 420ex is that it does not have a manual mode, so there is no way when you take remove it from the camera to control how much light it puts out. The thing that is great about the Vivitar 285HV's is that they are pretty cheap and fully manual.

I need a bunch of practice with this setup, and I most likely will need to pickup some type of backdrop, but I already can see a benefit to getting the flash off the camera. I took a few shots today, pretty ad-hock shots while I was playing around with getting everything working.

Here is one I took of Evelyn while Val was holding her:

Not my best shot, her left eye is out of focus, but I light how the lighting came out.

This one I like, of course I had to play around with some layer effects on this one: