This year the Bundi Ustav Festival in India happened just a few days after the Pushkar Camel Fair about five hours away. Festivities began with the traditional Kalash Yatra parade where sari-clad ladies marched through the narrow streets of Bundi carrying pots on their heads.
The action was fast and the streets were jam-packed with lookie-loos. There was no time or space to set up remote side lighting considering the ever-changing shift of movement on the street. So I relied on my Ray ring flash on camera for an extra kick of light. I set the ring for normal exposure but dropped the ambient reading down 2/3′s to one stop so as to let the flash just begin to dominate.
Here’s a few sample images to illustrate the effect. Notice how brilliant the colors look with the addition of a bit of shadowless ring light punch. Rings don’t have a wide field of coverage and work best for longer focal length upper body and portrait shots. There’s not full coverage of light when the lens is zoomed to wider angles. This often helps to create a bit of light falloff for more sculptural effects but if the center is hotter than I like, then in Lightroom I click the image in the center with a large feathered brush set to minus 10 or 15 points to darken the exposure.
Unlike Pushkar where there are literally thousands of tourists at the camel fair, there were probably less than a hundred tourists at the Bundi Festival. And the Rajasthani Tourist Department made sure all of us were treated royally, even providing a veritable Rajasthani feast for us all. Below left is a shot of me all decked out with a Rajasthani turban and a lei. On the right is a shot of my friend, Tim Draper, one of the shooters for the Rough Guides whom I met at Pushkar. As you can see, his turban was tied more photogenically than mine.
The center photo above shows my ring flash setup. Above the camera in the hot shoe you’ll see a Pocket Wizard TT5 radio transmitter with the little AC3 Zone Controller attached. Here I’m using a Canon 5D Mark II with a 24-105mm lens. On the bottom side of the camera I’ve mounted another TT5 radio for the 430EX II flash that’s rigged up in the Ray Ring Flash unit. This entire lower assembly is attached to the camera via a 1/4×20 bolt. I sawed the head off so that one end could screw into the camera’s tripod threaded hole and the other end could screw into a flash cold shoe that also has a 1/4×20 treaded hole on the underside. The TT5 is mounted onto this cold shoe. The two silver collars at the base of the camera enable me to tighten the bolt against the camera in one direction and the cold shoe in the other direction for a tight fit.
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Glen Allison
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