Well as you can see above, I was able to pull it off.  I have to give full credit for the idea to David Hobby over at strobist.com .  I personally think this is the best shot of the day but of course, there was a process to get here.  I’ll get into the details below.

Grace, her son and myself showed up at my Dad’s ranch in early afternoon.  We visited for a while, ate a few too many laxatives plums while the boy did as boys do, played and got dirty.

Now before I even went out there I figured we would have two sets of shots.  One indoors with some sort of background and a second outside after the sun had set.  We started indoors since it was 4pm and I wanted to get some solid safe shots.  We setup some background fabric across a doorway(hey, it works) then I setup my gear.  Having never done anything quite like this before, it was not quick or smooth.  I put my 50mm F/1.8 lens on my D90 and threw it on the tripod.  I setup my sb-600 on my light stand to camera left with a shoot-thru umbrella.  I put it pretty high, probably just a few inches shy of seven feet.  I took a few quick shots of Grace and decided we needed more side light to camera left.  I setup my SB-28 with an optical slave on my dad’s 1970’s vintage tripod.  It took a bit of tweaking to get the lighting balanced then we started taking shots.

Here is the result, nice even light and great detail.  This is a very “safe” shot and would have been fine as the final image.  Since we had this I figured why not try my second idea, which was to shoot into the sunset.

We went up by the hay barn and setup facing west.  I had a very similar light setup as before, Sb-600 with shoot-thru umbrealla to camera left but I had it a bit higher in the air, closer to 7′6″ or so.  Sb-28 to camera right to provide some side fill. 

I took a few shots on program mode to let the camera give me a starting ISO/aperture/shutter speed.  I then switched to manual mode and closed down the aperture two stops, to darken the background.  A few more test shots of Grace and I was set.

I was pleased as punch with the results!  I was going to call it quits but on my next shot I noticed my right side flash was not firing.  I gave the optical slave a slight tweak and back at my camera I took a “test” shot.  Well Grace’s son had done something to make my stepmom laugh and I caught it in the pic at the top of this post.  Amazing how that happened really.  If my right side fill flash had not failed to fire, I would never have gotten the best pic of the day! 

I took a few more shots after the final image(at the top of the post) but still liked that one the best.  I then took a few shots of Grace’s son then it was back inside to eat dinner and let everybody warm back up.

It was not until we looked at the pictures on my Dad’s computer that we really realized what we had.  The quality of light combined with that amazing 50mm lens captured so much detail I was blown away!  While I imagine these will be printed in 8×10 size, I bet they could go 16×20 or larger as they have so much detail and resolution in them. 

So there you go, with just a few small strobes I was able to capture some images that will be forever on display on family walls.  The small wireless lights gave me the flexibility to quickly make adjustments and move them as I wanted.  Who needs to spend $800 on a studio setup.. pssshhh.