I spent a wonderful Saturday evening as a guest of Potomac Valley Nature Photographers (you were invited too) at Antietam Battlefield. If you have been following the blog you may have noticed I’ve been inspired to use my little strobe off camera.  That inspiration comes from the Strobist. Here is an example.

Gear: In addition to your camera you will need the ability to remotely trigger your flash. Nikon owners with a D70 or above using a SB600 or SB800 strobe have this capability built in. Sorry I don’t know the details for other manufactures. Perhaps someone can leave an enlightening comment. A tripod will be very helpful as you’ll be shooting in dim light.

Shooting: Let your imagination go wild. But this technique works best with some interesting foreground element that is relatively dimly lit and a relatively bright background…like the sky. For our example I chose a fence at sunset. In this scene the actual sunset is behind the camera and obscured by cloud. I used a graduated neutral density filter to darken the sky a bit but otherwise this is what the scene looked like without any processing etc. The vignetting is from my Cokin filter holder…I need to get the wide angle version…or as suggested to me just hold the thing.

fence raw

Okay, agreed not too earth shattering. The above picture was not used to make the final image its just to show the “straight scene”.

Here is the fun part. Place your flash to light the foreground element. Try different placements. Go wild. Make people including fellow photographers think you’re a little nuts. Pretend to be a little kid. You get the idea. Whatever it takes.

I chose the following image to make my final picture.

flashfence

A little more interesting but certainly not finished. If I actually knew what I was doing, I’d have turned down the flash a little and exposed the rest of the scene a little more. Add a warming gel to the flash and this might not have needed much post processing at all. But alas, I don’t know what I’m doing and we thankfully have Photoshop and Elements.

Post Processing: With flash (as exposed) this is a fairly high dynamic range picture so you should have shot it in RAW. If you didn’t go back and re-shoot. :-) Do two raw conversions of the one image. One exposed for bright areas and one exposed for the dim areas. Convert both to JPEG. (In Elements the conversion to JPEG is a must I’m not sure about Photoshop.)

The bright version:

flashfence

The dim version:

dim flash

Now layer the two images, the the bright one over the dim one. In Elements use the eraser set at maybe 30 percent opacity to erase away areas that are too bright in the top layer. This step in photoshop involves masks…you’ll have to tell me how it works…or ask Cathy or Al. Merge or flatten the two images.

I then did a little cropping and used a skylight filter plus a little red to make it look as if the last sunbeam of the day was illuminating the fence.

fencefinished

Hope you like it. For my next project I’m going to hide about a dozen strobes in and around that tree in the background! For a larger version and a bit of historical info on this place click here.