Lighting Differently

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UPDATE:

Ben forced me to take his beloved YouTube money-making face off this post. What a bitch. Subsequently, all that stuff about remote lighting with a warming gel was deleted with it. Sorry, just going to have to wait until I have legitimate examples haha

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Photography has nearly taken a total back seat since being here. Just nearly though. When the mood strikes, I break out the camera and the good old SB-600 flash unit.

Lately I've been messing around with my lighting techniques in the brief time that I spend shooting. Those who know me well know that I like to shoot faces, especially while using my SB-600 set on remote with the D300's pop-up flash on commander. Some of the time, I like to put a warming gel on the flash and dial my WB to bluer kelvin settings to make some color in an otherwise drab environment. Take for instance the photo below:

Ok, let's get into some crazier stuff:

Me shooting a self portrait.

Except for cropping, this photo was not processed in Photoshop at all. To those who liked that pic I took of myself while in the car (John haha), this pic was taken the same night.

Same flash dance. I used the pop-up flash on rear curtain sync. Rear curtain sync pops the flash at the very end of the exposure, meaning if you had the shutter open for 3 seconds, the flash would pop right at the very end, when the shutter is closing. What does this mean? Well, everyone knows that if your shutter is held too long you're going to get motion blur. To alleviate this, the rear curtain sync setting freezes all action in place right at the end of the exposure. This means you can move around all you want and the flash will ensure that you are still sharp in the photo. This also gives the lighting a really cool effect because it is mixing ambient light on a long exposure with flash lighting.

For this particular photo, I set my shutter to a 20 second exposure with rear curtain sync flash mode. Then, I pressed the shutter and spun around slowly, making sure that the dining room light was being captured. Since I was spinning around, the dining room light appears in the photo as yellow streaks. Lastly, as the shutter starts to close, the flash goes off, freezing my face in place.

As you can see, this makes for some interesting exposures since the light from the dining room not only dances around but also appears to be behind and in front of my face. Think of the possibilities. I am! I can't wait to take these principles and use them in more productive photos than my own face.

Hopefully I'll have some time (and motivation) this weekend or next to show you some real examples of these lighting techniques. As for now, I'll sit on my ideas.