Mixed Blessings

Last weekend was a jam packed Caroline weekend ending with her schools annual Father Daughter Dance.  Although I’m not really into shooting my “subjects” as Terry is, sometimes cool opportunities present the chance to work on technique.  The Father Daughter Dance was perfect for some slow shutter off camera flash work.

The technique, dragging the shutter, is pretty simple.  Open up your aperture to allow as much light in as possible keeping in mind the DoF.  Dial your shutter speed in sloooowww, say 1/8 or 1/6; play with this a bit to adjust just how much of the ambient light you want to expose.  Next, dial in your flash to provide enough light to expose your subjects properly and set it to fire at the end of the exposure.

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

The trick now is to balance your shutter and flash to achieve the desired look.  In the case above, I under exposed the background and let the flash do most of the work.  I held the flash low and to the right to add the drama. Lastly I added a 1/4 CTO gel to help warm things up a bit.  Pretty cool results if you as me… 

A few more examples with different settings for different results.

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 400, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –2 1/3 2nd-curtain sync

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

 

Add a little twist to the camera and this is what you get.

Canon 1d Mark III, .5 s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

Canon 1d Mark III, .3 s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

So there you have it.  Lots of fun and some pretty cool images to show for it.  I still have no clue what I’m doing but sometimes you just hit upon something that works and go with it.  ;-) 

All the rest of the images.

Enjoy.