The Twilight Zone

Now that’s a creative title for a post! And it might even get me in trouble with the IP police. But I digress… What I’ll try to do here is to balance flash with ambient at twilight (or close to twilight). Here’s where I started:

Not very twilight-ish, is it? I could have stopped down the aperture a bit (shootin’ in manual but automatically dialing in f/5.6, and it never occurred to me to darken that sky by stopping down, even though I had about 3 more stops of power left in my flash… bleh!).

Since I totally refused to actually think while shooting this series, I had to wait a while for the sky to darken a bit (yeah, ‘cause everyone knows you can’t darken the sky by going from f/5.6 to f/8 and then setting the flash to 1/8th + 0.3 instead of 1/16th + 0.3… jeez!).

These have more twilight feel, but still weren’t “just right” Oh, and composition had taken the day off, too. Only center of the frame subjects… good grief!

My subjects had to leave, so I coaxed my son to model a bit afterwards, for an even more “twilight” feel:

Now that’s more like it! All I need now is to get some composition classes so I can produce a shot that doesn’t look too boring!

Lighting info: ISO 100, 1/200, f/5.6, flash (bare) on stand at camera left at 1/16th + 0.3 (you can get an idea on the following shot)

‘Till next time!