Monday, October 01, 2007

Nice Dappled Sunlight in Ault Park

Recently I went down to Ault Park for a quick shoot. The sun was heading down & since it was such a nice day the park was kind of busy. Instead of fighting the crowd near the pavilion, we noticed some nice light coming through the willow trees near the entrance.

The trees provided some interesting dappled light that we used on as the highlight on the model's left, while a speedlight in a shoot-through umbrella provided some fill on the right. The trick to getting this to work is to make sure that she's standing in just the right place - a step forward or backward would take her out of the light & you'd lose the effect. A good trick is to watch your shadow - if you can see the outline of your head in the shadow then you're in the sunlight.
Cincinnati model photographerIn this next shot, I kept the same lighting setup but pulled back a bit in order to shoot through the leaves of the trees & get a bit of the feel of the scenery involved.
Cincinnati model photography
Both images shot with the Canon 50mm f/1.4 on the Canon 30D. Exposure was 1/60sec @ f/7.1, ISO 200.

4 comments:

Viktor said...

Wow, that looks really great!
Could you give some detail about the flash? Which one? At which ratio? How triggered? :)
Thx in advance and keep up your great works :)

Viktor

Ryan R. Dlugosz said...

Thanks Viktor. I believe the flash was the Nikon SB-26, but I could be wrong. Triggering was via a PocketWizard. It was set to around 1/2 to full power (you lose a lot of light through the umbrella) and very close to the model.

The ratio wasn't precisely calculated, though I'd say it's a stop or two below the sun highlight & the ambient light in the background is a stop or so down from the flash. I just took one or two quick test shots to establish the right flash exposure & adjusted the shutter speed from there until I got the look I wanted.

Viktor said...

Thanks for the infos :)
Gonna try the flash manually on my next shoots, so it's interesting with which settings other use them...

Cheers, Viktor

Ed Lee said...

Striking images..thanks for sharing. Ed--