Vanessa at Borders
This evening I took Vanessa to Borders, where we spent about an hour and a half browsing before the bookstore closed at 11 p.m. She collected a few books, set them down on an easy chair, and left for a few minutes, during which I decided I wanted to get a candid shot of her as she perused her materials. In order to challenge myself a bit, I also decided I would take exactly ONE photo, no more, and hope for the best. So while Vanessa was away, I set up my camera and speedlight and planned the shot, for which I settled on a shutter speed of 1/350 sec., an ISO of 200, an aperture of f/2.8, white balance set for flash, and vertical orientation of the camera. A minute or so after she settled into her chair, I whipped out the camera (which had been mostly hidden from view), aimed it at her, and pushed the shutter button.
I decided to upload this pretty much the way it came out of the camera, apart from cropping and minor adjustments in curves and contrast. While I don't claim this to be any kind of masterpiece, my only real complaint about it is that there is excessive light falloff in the distance. The store wasn't really as dark as it appears here; but then, if I had used a longer shutter speed, Vanessa herself might have been overexposed, and she, after all, was my subject. I did manage to make the light immediately around her nearly perfect, and without some kind of secondary light source, I couldn't have done much about the background anyway. I wish I could have used a solid-color background, or perhaps a muslin one, just on the other side of where Vanessa was sitting. (I could create a new background in PSE, and might do that sometime, but I find that doing so is often more troublesome and time-consuming than it is really worth.)
On the other hand, perhaps I should have used a slower shutter speed and set the flash for rear-curtain sync, a feature I've never used before. I didn't think of that until the following morning, when I was working out on an exercise bike at the gym and alleviated the boredom by reading a book about exposure.
But its imperfections notwithstanding, I had a lot of fun planning and executing this little miniproject.
Vanessa at Borders
This evening I took Vanessa to Borders, where we spent about an hour and a half browsing before the bookstore closed at 11 p.m. She collected a few books, set them down on an easy chair, and left for a few minutes, during which I decided I wanted to get a candid shot of her as she perused her materials. In order to challenge myself a bit, I also decided I would take exactly ONE photo, no more, and hope for the best. So while Vanessa was away, I set up my camera and speedlight and planned the shot, for which I settled on a shutter speed of 1/350 sec., an ISO of 200, an aperture of f/2.8, white balance set for flash, and vertical orientation of the camera. A minute or so after she settled into her chair, I whipped out the camera (which had been mostly hidden from view), aimed it at her, and pushed the shutter button.
I decided to upload this pretty much the way it came out of the camera, apart from cropping and minor adjustments in curves and contrast. While I don't claim this to be any kind of masterpiece, my only real complaint about it is that there is excessive light falloff in the distance. The store wasn't really as dark as it appears here; but then, if I had used a longer shutter speed, Vanessa herself might have been overexposed, and she, after all, was my subject. I did manage to make the light immediately around her nearly perfect, and without some kind of secondary light source, I couldn't have done much about the background anyway. I wish I could have used a solid-color background, or perhaps a muslin one, just on the other side of where Vanessa was sitting. (I could create a new background in PSE, and might do that sometime, but I find that doing so is often more troublesome and time-consuming than it is really worth.)
On the other hand, perhaps I should have used a slower shutter speed and set the flash for rear-curtain sync, a feature I've never used before. I didn't think of that until the following morning, when I was working out on an exercise bike at the gym and alleviated the boredom by reading a book about exposure.
But its imperfections notwithstanding, I had a lot of fun planning and executing this little miniproject.