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  • May 16th, 2011

    Magic of Light

    hey everybody,

    another evening which seems not good enough to sleep early. So I’ll try to use the time to post something. Unfortunately, not every day is a big big highlight – think nobody is interested that I decorated today my new office with some pictures from africa and japan but I hope some people are interested how to make a skyscraper picture of some flowers ;). Hope some of you saw the one below and now some more with some explanation:

    This is the result if you just take your camera put it on the ground, autofocus on, aperture to 18-22 and shot. Think it’s easy to see that the foreground is too dark and even the sky seems a little bit dead. Reason is also simple – you can see the sun so the leafs I’m shooting are on the shadow site => Solution: bring more light so the leafs.

    You can see there is much more light at the flowers but what happened to the sky – its even darker. I used a flash with manual control – I thought the sun is very very bright so I tried to shoot with full power flash. This leads to shorter shutter speed which was enough for the flowers and the sun but to less for the sky => too dark sky. But this shows as well that weather isn’t that important if you have enough light power with you. With a even brighter flash this picture would look like night => Flash light gives you much more control about the picture!

    This one is with less than 1/4 of the Flash power. Looks much more natural – a perfect natural look isn’t possible because our brain recognize that’s not possible to see the sun and have this bright flowers in front of you even if you do not think about such stuff.

    Another thing I want to say is about “wrong” exposure. There is no wrong exposure!!! Our eye and our brain trick us every day concerning exposure and colors so how can something be wrong we can’t judge.

    • First one looks to dark but is more natural => looks more like a snap shot
    • Second one look artificial => picture have something interesting – you have to think about the picture which isn’t that reasonable with this motive but with another one this could be a very cool effect.
    • Third one is a good mixture => could be a good beginning for a stock picture. The stock I uploaded is finally the one I posted some days before because stock picture has to be a little bit extreme to catch the customers eye in very short time.

    Hope you learned something and the post will make you want to take some pictures with flash light on your own.

    N8

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