Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Environmental Boating Portrait

We had fun creating this photograph of a couple sitting on their antique, wooden boat at dusk. An off-camera flash was set up about 40 feet to the left of the camera, on the shoreline, and a grid was attached to reduce the spread of the light. The photo was taken a few minutes after sunset and we intentionally underexposed for the ambient light in the image and lit the people with the flash. The speedlight was set manually to 1/2 power. The goals were to focus attention on the people, keep enough detail in the boat to recognize it and have the boat's running lights noticeable.
All of this was essentially accomplished with the original image but we made some improvements in post-processing computer work. First, we slightly increased the brightness of the people relative to the background. Second, we changed the color temperature of the background to blue to more resemble night light (we added a mask to keep the color temperature of the people and the running lights from changing). If I were to do this again I would either increase the power of the flash or position the boat closer to the flash unit.
Shot at 1/200 second at f/5.6, ISO 400, 50mm lens.

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