Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Twilight ice fishing.

Probably the biggest thing about color photography was taught to me in elementary school and that is complimentary colors work well together in an image. The easiest way to do this in photography is shooting in a tungsten white balance in daylight situations and then bring in gelled strobes to warm up select areas of the image. In this shot I wanted to convey the cold that usually goes along with ice fishing but have the warmth of the shelter at the same time. The tungsten white balance took the already slightly blue natural light and kind of amped it up. I then put an SB-800 with a full cut of color temperature orange gel in a cup holder attached to the wall inside the fish house. The problem was that the flash inside couldn't read the signal from my commander SB-800 that was on camera. The easiest way to fix this would have been to hook up a flash cord to run the commander unit off camera but that had been left out of the bag by mistake. To get the needed effect I ended up daisy chaining a signal from the camera to the flash inside. I set the flash on the camera to fire on manual so there wasn't any monitor pre-flash and then set a second outside strobe to work as a slave unit, firing only when it "saw" the flash fire on camera then it would fire triggering the flash inside the same way. If I would have left the pre-flash on the main unit it would have triggered the first slave before the exposure and that wouldn't have been in the proper sync. Also, I had to make sure the power on both flashes outside were set as low as possible so they didn't effect the outside exposure.

Camera: D300
Lens: 20mm

1 comment:

  1. Jon, I LOVE this one! Excellent work making the look and feel of the ice fishing environment really pop off the page. Keep it up :)

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