Ever listen to a song over and over again and get it stuck in your head? Tonight I had Barry Louis Polisar's "All I Want Is You" stuck in my head, so I decided to see if I could use it as inspiration for my picture. I went with the first line of the song ("If I was a flower growing wild and free, all I'd want is you to be my sweet honey bee.") as the scene that I was trying to recreate. I didn't have any real flowers (except my orchid that has been in too many pictures) or honey bees, so I went with a fake flower and my daughter's favorite bee stuffed animal (we're not sure that it is a bee, but she is, so it is a bee).
I wanted to show motion the "old school" way (without using photoshop), so I decided to try out my camera's "rear curtain sync" mode. In this mode, the lens stays open for a time and then the flashes fire right before the lens closes. This way, the open lens captures some of the light from the motion, then, at the end of the sequence, the flashes fire and imprint the end of the scene (this all happens in a portion of a second). To set this up, I used an SB-600 with a grid camera left and other SB-600 with a grid camera right and high (the grids did a nice job of keeping my light from spilling every where). In order to capture the motion, I placed a desk lamp facing upwards directly below the flower and the bee. I just tossed the bee toward the flower and hit the camera's remote a couple of times until I got one that I liked (I got lucky, it only took about 5 or 6 tries). For the black background, I just left about 15 feet behind the whole setup and made sure that my flashes didn't spill onto it. The flashes were fired with the D90's popup flash set to "--". Everything (flashes and camera) was in manual mode. You can get the specifics in the EXIF data if you want it.
No comments:
Post a Comment