Attree Images

After our session at Spring Hill we relocated to another outdoor location to give us a different look and also to make use of the late afternoon sun. Unfortunately we spent a little too long at our Spring Hill location so by the time we arrived at the second location we only had about 20 minutes before the sun disappeared behind the tree line. 

I quickly set up my Bowens Explorer pack with one Bowens Quad head attached which gave me some more grunt to play with compared to a single Nikon Speedlight. I made the most of the setting sun, capturing images like this one of Megan, shooting back into the sunlight. The Bowens flash positioned on camera right and pointing back at Megan allowed me to underexpose the background and overpower the sun. 

That gorgeous sunlight unfortunately disappeared all to quickly and we were left with a rather flat and cool available light as shown by this image.

Of course this is by no means a bad image and with a bit of post production, it could be rather lovely but I was missing that beautiful backlight that the sun was giving me so I decided to have a go at creating my own sun.

I positioned an SB900 behind Megan so that it was throwing light from roughly the same direction as the sun was previously and added an orange gel to it. This time I used the cloudy white balance setting on my camera to add some warmth to the light coming from the Bowens as well as add extra warmth to my "sun". Again I underexposed the available light and by shooting with a long lens and with the SB900 only just out of frame on camera right, I managed to get that lovely bit of flare, similar to what I was achieving when shooting into the real sun previously. 

For this last image of Lauren I decided to make the most of the last bit of light and try and capture the beautiful pink and blue hues of the dusk sky. This was a fairly simple shot, achieved by Adam hand holding an SB900, again zoomed to 200mm to control the spread and concentrate the light onto Lauren. This was triggered by another SB900 mounted on the hotshoe of my D3 so I could control the output from the camera position using TTL metering. Again the available light was underexposed which increased the saturation of the sky to really bring out the pink and blue tones. 

We all had a really fun afternoon and I'm looking forward to doing it again soon. A big thanks again to Megan, Lauren and Crisly for their patience and putting up with the cold late in the afternoon.