Alyssa and the Gold Confetti (or how I spent my Sunday morning)

I had lunch yesterday with friends and we were talking about doing various photo projects. The subject of intentional lens flare came up, and I mentioned I had done something similar recently. Thought I'd post it on the blog. We've tried various backlighting ideas before in the studio with mixed results, honestly some really bad results. So this kind of thing really isn't for the faint of heart. This shot results from pure accident. It started out as an exercise in rear sync flash -- the idea was to drop gold confetti from above my model (here Alyssa), and slow the shutter speed down and rear sync the flash to get some motion blur in the falling confetti. I had envisioned a very subtle backlight, probably in a softbox and probably from one side. I figured the challenge would be the front light. As I was setting up a bare flash I did a test more for position since I was on a tripod, and I liked the effect. Alyssa wasn't even in the frame at this point. So I set up another identical flash on the other side and went to work. Lots of stuff going on here -- backlight, flare, falling confetti. What's interesting is that my assistant here was dropping the confetti between me and Alyssa, so during all 50-60 frames we did here, there wasn't one bit of confetti on Alyssa. I thought there would be more blur in the falling confetti -- something that still puzzles me a bit. Worth trying again though. Finals were 1/5 sec at f/22, SB900 in a large octa from camera right at full power, 2 bare SB800s in the rear at 1/8 power in SU-4 mode. So how did I spend my Sunday morning? Vacuuming up gold confetti.