Flash and Manipulating Lighting

On Thursday, the class went out to Hartlepool Headland with the Hassleblad and Phase One back, a portable Bowens light and a battery pack. The idea behind the lesson was that even on a sunny day, the lighting can be manipulated to look like evening. By making the light from the flash overpower the background, it blackened the sky even though it was a very sunny day. the image below was taken on my own camera at the right exposure with no flash. This is a comparison between the flash and the ambient light together in a picture, and manipulating the camera to only react to the flash.



For example, I set up the flash and the 'Blad at the same f-stop by metering. The shutter speed was the only setting I had to change. I started at 1/500th of a second with the ISO set at 100 (1) The ambient light (the light from everywhere but the flash) is altered dramatically when set on a really high shutter speed. On picture two, the shutter speed was 1/125th second and picture 3 the shutter speed was 1/30th second.

(1) (2)
(3)

I learned a lot about which settings to have and how to achieve this outcome, but I also had a good chance to set up the light and camera properly which I'd not really done before. A very successful exercise me thinks.