Boulder Creek

Photo above was taken at Boulder Creek in Boulder, Colorado last spring. One of my interests visually the past few years has been moving water, and the whole area of Boulder was full of opportunities. Shot this one handheld near the falls, f/14, 1/30 sec at 190mm. Added some details with Nik Color Efex, then did a really contrasty black and white conversion with Nik Silver Efex.

Environmental Portrait

From Joe McNally's new book Sketching Light:

Straight flash be ugly, right? You can take someone who has a wisp of a chance of being attractive, and easily turn them into Quasimodo via the transformational wonders of bad light. But sometimes it's the only game in town. Sometimes, you have to use it. And sometimes, maybe, it's not so bad.

I normally don't post too many photos from my work at UTMB in Galveston on the blog, but I thought this one was interesting. I'm in the middle of reading Joe McNally's new book, and he had a section about on-camera flash and use of ring flash. See quote above. Not too long after that, I was taking an environmental portrait of a researcher at UTMB. I've walked this hallway many times over the past couple of years and always wanted to try a long compressed portrait here. Trouble was this trip became an impromptu portrait with my subject, and my only light was an on-camera SB900 in a Lumiquest 80-20. So I used the beige walls about 3-4 feet from camera left to shoot the 80-20 directly into ... letting it bounce and fill. Not ideal, but like McNally says, "sometimes it's the only game in town. And sometimes it's not so bad."