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old friend, originally uploaded by cecily.
It’s 1 AM, I can’t sleep, so what do I do? I start practicing photography techniques.
It’s a sickness, I tell you.
At any rate, to get this shot, I positioned the bear on top of a CD tower. The background is an old piece of black foam core that I bought from an art supply store for about $3.50. I positioned an off-camera flash — attached to a lamp with my Gorillapod SLR tripod, no less — at a 45-degree angle to the bear, camera right.
I set the D300 to Commander mode, which means the camera would control the output of the off-camera flash wirelessly. I didn’t set a flash mode for the on-camera flash because I didn’t want it to go off and ruin the light; instead, I left that setting blank. Â I also set the speedlight up in the camera’s controls, and used iTTL metering. If you’re a Nikon shooter, you’ll know what iTTL means.Â
Before I took the shot, I set the camera in program mode, and metered the bear using the camera’s Matrix metering (evaluative for you Canon shooters out there). I made a note of the suggested aperture and shutter speed, and switched the camera to manual mode. Then while in manual mode, I dialed down the shutter speed to 1/15 of a second and took the shot. Â This technique is called “dragging the shutter”, and the best time to use it is when you want to keep background detail in your shot. This way, instead of the black foam core looking like a featureless black blob, it actually shows some texture, slight color, and detail.Â
I set the flash to fire rear curtain sync because I’d heard you get better detail this way. I tried it with front curtain sync but couldn’t tell the difference in the light, but this shot came out better, so this is the one I ultimately used.
Post-processed with Wynona Robison’s Subtle Cross Processing and New Groove Photoshop Actions.
