Well it's now Saturday evening and I'm sitting on 7.47 with 129 votes! It's been fairly steady with the odd rise and fall but I am super happy with the score!
This is shot of my son Nathaniel (again) who has just turned two. He's not quite the willing model that has been suggested in the comments and you have to work very hard and get the timing pretty quick with him as after half a second he's off again. I spent most of the 10 minute shoot running along the beach in front of him with a 10kg kit bag on my back, 5dMkII in one hand and the 580EXII with FlexTT5 in the other at full arms reach!!
So on to the technical details... I decided to shoot this with the 5dMkII and 580EXII as I wanted to shoot this one for this challenge and it's an easier setup to use then the G11 from my free study shot.
So the 5D MkII is on Aperture Priority mode with the Exposure Compensation set to -2 and the flash exposure comp set to +2/3 I think. Flash is fired via TTL through a FlexTT1 on camera and FlexTT5 on the flash. Aperture was set to f/4, ISO to 100, and focal length to 16mm to get as much of the background is as I could. Shutter speed was then hitting around 1/4000 to 1/8000 so it really shows how good the FlexTT's are at handling high speed sync. As many of you might say, why did I not use a narrower aperture to get the shutter speed down, but my problem was that this was taken at around 2pm and so it was still very bright, my 580EXII would start hitting it's limit at ISO 100 and a narrow aperture, so I let the high speed sync do the work instead.
The setting is a beach in Kessingland, Suffolk, England and it's about 100 miles from my house in Essex. My Nan-in-law lives there though and so we went to visit her for her 80th Birthday, not for a shoot on the beach :0)
This is also my 100th challenge entry so a good finish here will be great.
I'll post a couple of other shots from the shoot when the challenge is over.
Update Post Challenge...
Wow!!! A blue ribbon and a new PB for my 100th Entry! Thank you to all those that voted and commented.
Post Processing for the Image was quite simple:
RAW Conversion in LR3 with contrast, colour balance, vignette.
Opened in CS3 with a shadow/highlight adjustment, new soft light layer, gaussian blur on that layer then a Unsharp mask on the original layer, colour balance adjustment layer
I think that's everything
Here are some other shots from the beach:
And one last image to show the effect the flash is having, here is a shot when the flash didn't fire, as you can see without the flash Nathan is a pure silhouette:
Statistics
Place: 1 out of 64 Avg (all users): 7.4286 Avg (commenters): 8.6250 Avg (participants): 7.2353 Avg (non-participants): 7.4867 Views since voting: 6787 Views during voting: 471 Votes: 147 Comments: 39 Favorites: 5 (view)
Wow, beautiful shot, and wasn't I a little surprised of it being from my hometown! (Well I'm from Lowestoft, which Kessingland is a part of)
Makes me miss that place :(
Congratulations on the Blue, but with the flash shadows being thrown backwards it is not really fill flash, as fill flash is to nuetralise the forground with the background light with no shadows.
Congratulations on the blue, and thanks a lot for all the explanations: I definitely want to try such technique soon, given how beautiful are the photos you showed there!
Man, I had your son pegged for a boy mpeters has used before. And the picture is such his style too. Congrats on the ribbon. I knew it would be blue, I guess I just didn't know who took it. :)
Great personality and expression in his eyes. Less power on the flash wouldve been a lot better in my opinion, the shadows are too strong. One of my favorites nevertheless. 9
My pick for blue - very captivating. Amazing background and pleasing colors all around. I would've probably liked slightly less power from the flash to balance with ambient light better, but then the subject wouldn't stand out as well, so not sure about that.
superb! he's really good at posing, you're lucky! is this G11 with remote flash again? you really mastered the technique, and the sky is fantastic. my pick for the blue, I'm sure you're landing on first page...
Meets Challenge 10 Impact 10 Technicals 8 Processing 8 Creativity 8 Total (weighted) 9
Fabulous shot , the colours are fantastic and the little man a star in the making - well done
The Beach
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