using flash

[elkordel]

This is one of my first attempts using flash. I really think flashes give new dimension to photography. Hope you like the pic but most of all please tell me of anything that you find wrong or not pleasing to the eye.

Cheers!
Elias

[carregwen]

Elias

You are quite right - flash (either flash-gun or studio lights) can make a huge difference to the quality of a shot. It has something of a bad press as it's often not used correctly. I like your shot, the colours are very bold, and the composition is good. I think you have a problem with the white balance (WB) as you have a yellow cast to it. I edited the shot in CS5 RAW editor and cooled the WB. The yellow cast has gone and the colours look better. Hope you don't mind that?

You ought to resize your images for upload to be 700 pixels on the longest side. If you do it through tinypics on this site they get reduced automatically, but it's a good practice to do it yourself to 700 max. If you hosted this 1.5MB file on Flickr it's dimensions of 1600 pixels would be too large to fit on this site and would over-run the page. You also increase the risk of someone ripping your shots at a decent size and using them illegally. My edit below is 500 pixels on the long side. Can you see the difference in size between mine and your original?

[elkordel]

Thanks Rob,
followed your advice and changed the original pic.
Please feel free to edit any image I upload. After all I think thats the purpose of the "interactive" learning experience!!

[carregwen]

Thanks Rob,
followed your advice and changed the original pic.
Please feel free to edit any image I upload. After all I think thats the purpose of the "interactive" learning experience!!

I see your exposure was manual, with 0.25sec exposure. That's a little slow for a portrait where the subject was possibly moving. Did you have the flash off-camera, as most of the light seems to be coming from the left? The flash would fire at about 1/1000 sec but was there any other light?

[Colin Southern]

I see your exposure was manual, with 0.25sec exposure. That's a little slow for a portrait where the subject was possibly moving.

To be honest Rob, with a backlit scene like that you can pretty much get away with it if the flash is the sole source of foreground illumination (because there's no effective foreground illumination in that direction).

[Colin Southern]

Just had a wee play with the image myself, taking an alternate interpretation ...

[elkordel]

To be honest Rob, with a backlit scene like that you can pretty much get away with it if the flash is the sole source of foreground illumination (because there's no effective foreground illumination in that direction).

As Colin mentioned, I actually metered for the sky to get as much of that sundown as possible (my light was changing so rapidly, that I lost some of my shots) and the key light was the flash that you correctly said is placed camera left.