Day27- Have a Cold One

Day27- Have a Cold One
Originally uploaded by Emanon Photography

I'm blogging about this photo that I shot today because I think it is really cool, and I like it even more each time I look at it. This is a cool example of a single off-camera flash photo.

the set up for this was pretty simple. I placed the glass on the edge of a counter. I set my Canon 40D to Manual mode. My off camera flash for this photo was an old Spiratone Master-Strobe which was connected to my camera with a PC-Sync cord. This old flash unit has 4 power levels, color coded white, yellow, red, and Green, I think the roughly correlate to 1/4 power increments. So the exposure control is made by adjusting the aperture. This flash unit sync with my 40D up to 1/350sec. though this shot was made at 1/250th sec. which is fast enough to pretty much black out the background, which was possible since I cut off all the room lights, so that my flash was the only light source.

Now, with only one light source, positioning it for this shot was critical. I wanted it to look like the glass of ice water was glowing. I experimented with placing the light to both sides, and above, but the shot seemed to be missing the punch. I then moved the flash off to the camera left side, and slightly behind the glass. I also pointed the flash up on an angle toward the top area of the glass. With that change of position, The glass came alive with a cool blue glow. The glass itself is tinted teal glass, and while I was cleaning the image up in Aperture2 I pushed the White-Balance a little bit more toward the blue side.

Please comment on this photo here on the blog, or click on the photo to follow the link over to my FlickR Photostream and let me know what you think of this photo.

Cheers,
Pete