Uno Duo Trio Photo-shoot with Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 600EX-RT, 580EX, Phottix Odin and Lighting Accessories

One of my recent favorite restaurants is UNO DUO TRIO – Lana’s Italian Home-cooking. The chef owner Lana Oliviero was very impressed with the photos I took there during dinner after she read my recent blog post on her restaurant. She asked me to do a photo-shoot for her restaurant as it will be featured as award winning restaurant in an up-coming issue of a food magazine. So I will be taking this opportunity as a semi-review of the lighting gears I used for this photo-shoot.

The following is the list of gears I took for this photo-shoot:-

• Canon EOS 5D Mark II
• Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM
• Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM
• Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM
• Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM
• Canon Speedlite 600EX-RT
• Canon Speedlite 580EX
• Kenko Extension tube
• Phottix Odin TTL Flash Triggers
• 2 Phottix light-stands
• 2 Phottix Varos umbrella holders
• 2 Phottix Umbrella Lightboxes
• Gitzo tripod

I carried the camera, lenses, flashes and Odin flash triggers in a Lowepro Pro Runner x350 AW rolling backpack. The rest of the lighting gears and the Gitzo tripod fitted in another bag as shown in the photo below.

The following photo showed all the gears inside the bag above.

I have been using Phottix Odin TTL flash triggers for over half a year now and I can say they are incredibly easy to use and very reliable.

You can see from the photo above that the module in the centre is the transmitter which is mounted on the hotshoe of the camera. It has its’ own LCD display, which you can easily see at a glance how the 3 different groups of flash are set. The wonderful thing is that, you can alter power setting on the remote flashes on the Odin transmitter. There is no need to walk up to each individual flashes to alter flash power setting. The other great thing about Odin is of course the wireless transmission is based on radio-wave rather than infrared light. So the range is very long and you don’t need a direct line of vision between the transmitter and the receiver. This became very useful for this particular photo-shoot, as for some of the shots of the restaurant, I had to put the light at an area of the restaurant without direct line of vision from where I was shooting.

Now let’s see how the lights were setup. The following photo showed how the flash was mounted on the Odin receiver, which in turn was mounted on a Phottix Varos umbrella holder, which was mounted on a Phottix light-stand.

The next photo showed how a Phottix Umbrella Lightbox fitted onto this assembly.

The next photo takes a close look.

A piece of white cloth is then fitted with the attached velcro to finish the setup of the lightbox.

The great thing about this umbrella light box is that it is not only easy to carry, but it is also very easy and fast to setup. It takes only a minute or less to setup or put away. Another point to note is that, with the Canon flashes mounted inside these umbrella light-boxes, only radio based wireless flash triggers like the Odin would work.

Now I am going to start posting some of the photos form this photo-shoot. The first few photos were not shot with any lighting gears. They are HDR shots taken with available lighting only. The HDR shots were processed with Photoshop CS5.

The following shots of the restaurant were taken with lighting from 2 lightboxes.

The following food shots were taken with lighting from 2 lightboxes.

The following shots were taken with lighting from 1 lightbox.

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