Because I busted my kiester for this shot, I’m going to say how.
Yesterday was gray gray gray. Or maybe that was just the inside of my head. I was still trying to get something going, photographically (yeah, all the other ways, too) at the end of the day. To mess with my head (see above), I put on my manual 85 and filled my pockets with a manual off-camera strobe and a pair of cheapo triggers. Traipsing ensued.
I’m not good at adding light to scenes. “The ambient” is complicated enough. (I suppose that’s my favorite phrase—“the ambient”—I use it to mean, simply, everything as you find it.) Adding light takes the complexity up one order of magnitude. (Non-engineers (and engineers) often misuse that term when they want to say: “a lot.” It means “by 10X.” Two orders of magnitude is 100X.)
After a good bit of fruitless strobing/unseemly muttering, I remembered that my cheap knockoff Chinese triggers came with a claimed range of 100 feet. With a trigger on the camera and the receiving trigger affixed to the hotshoe of the strobe, you are supposed to be able to set it off a long way away. The light was fading and my favorite pair of blue silos were going to backlit black. I postholed through the deep snow and planted the strobe in a snowbank at the base of the near silo, aiming it up to fan the silo. The downside of strobes is that you can’t see what the light’s doing with your eyes–it’s too dang fast. So: 100 feet back through the snow, take the shot, check the power and spread of the flash.
They (the noncheap people) make devices that let you adjust power and spread of a strobe from a distance. Yesterday I began to understand the value of those devices. An assistant that I could shout stuff at would also be nice. But: me: back and forth through the snow to my knees.
What ended up being kind of cool about this photo isn’t the fan of subtly lighted blue (though without the light, it’d have been a black corner), but the yellow globe of the strobe itself. The brighter ball of light mid left is the strobe in the snowbank. The echoing ball of light just to the right, I don’t know what that is—a nice little surprise.
The setting sun upper right is lighting the snow.
There isn’t any light added to the leaf in the foreground–that there’s “the ambient.” I think it should have turned out backlit. So, who knows?
rpdpod 