Saturday 9 August 2014

To flash, or not to flash - that is the question

When working on the making of a photo, you need to assess the available light. 

Will the available light create an image that conveys the feeling that you had when you first conceived it?

Does the colour of the ambient light create the mood?

Can you work with the ambient light, or do you need to supplement it? Will you need gel filters for your flash to match the ambient light?

Or do you just want to kill the ambient light, and provide flash only?

That is what I decided to do for this image.





To capture this I used an optical slave on my SB23, and bounced the on camera flash (reduced to 1/128) off a chopping board behind the flower to trigger the SB23.


However, for the next image, I scoped out the shot ahead of time. I used the Photographers Ephemeris to find out when the sun would be in the right position to capture the shot. Time of year plays a part when you are making landscape shots. The sun rises in a different place every day. Late June, early July would have been best for this image, but I did not want to wait another 10-11 months to capture it.

So, we went out this morning, knowing just how to get to the spot I needed to make the photo. 

We headed out in sunshine, which turned into low cloud on the way.

Darn.

Still, we continued, just in case the sun peeped out through the cloud. And, as cloud cover is a huge diffuser, there was a chance that the clouds would thin enough to create the perfect shot. 

Sure enough, just as we packed up to leave after waiting for nearly 2 hours, the sun shone through and we captured this shot. 


Have a wonderful day.

Merran

ps - check out my website for more images framing-light.com

No comments:

Post a Comment