Light Painting on Vacations

Well it seems that the good days were over.

Back into Luxembourg and after almost 40 degrees in Croatia and a lower one's in Munich here the weather is not so good.
It looks like winter times have come in August, the weather is no longer the same as in the old days where they were almost fixed and now one day is summer the other is winter... what are we doing to the world :(

Anyway, I decided to pickup where I left, on the last post, and bring you some more cool stuff you can do with only your small strobe and also on vacation ;)

As we all know vacations are vacations and you're wife will tell you, almost of the time what to do, and keeps pushing you out "why did you bring the damn camera, aren't we on vacations?". Well if that happened to you you know what I mean, if not be prepared.

On vacation I usually travel light with my Powershot G6 but this time decided that I wanna to make some good photos and some good HDR (later on Flickr) and since I never been to that place why not carry a little more gear and take also the tripod, and again my wife complained (TRIPOD!!!).

Well enough of this bla, bla, bla thing and back to what I want you to see.

In the island of KRK photographic matter are everywhere from the beach to public places the people are nice and the weather helps also the light there is amazing the colors are so rich and the tones very nice.

One of those nights I went into the pear to make some night scenes and decided to use the flash on something different.

So I set the camera on the tripod, ISO 100, AV 9.0 and TV 15s and shoot the great sky at the marina.

Well... the shot did not came so good since it looked like so many others I've seen on some postcards they have there.

With Strobist in mind and after making my first try on Light Science and Magic book i decided to give it a live shot.

Grabbed the 580Ex popped up a couple of times to test how much light will be needed to fill what I wanted and this is what came out.



Well I set the flash to 1/64 after several manual tries. I was popped manually for better control of what I wanted to illuminate. Also got some details on the other side on the docks.

The tourist were admiring the chimp (Me) from the other side of the pear while I was running from one side to the other with my 580ex on the hand painting the boats ;) cool.

Thank god my wife was at the rented apartment or else she would have laugh to.



Setup shot is this one. You can still see me on the left side chimping ;)
This was a difficult to get focus on the boats since there were a lot of movement on the pear water and the boats would not stop for a moment, but I think I did I good and different capture.

The next shot I tried to put some people in it and balanced the WB to tungsten in order to get a stronger orange on the background and balance the tourists on the bench while they were admiring the BIG boat.



Here is the setup shot:



Since I was my assistant I had to run back and forward to and from the camera in order to get a clean shot and had to be careful so people would not leave their positions.

The settings were Av 5.6, Tv 1/3s and ISO 100. The flash was set to 1/128 and I was really very close to the people so the light won't spread too much into their fronts.

Hope that you make some great experiments with this technique that sometimes can save you in some difficult situations with parts of the photo with no light, also you get a different vacation photo.

Something com into my attention today while surfing around.
The subject is PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY and I was thinking I had a pretty good one until I saw this 2 videos from Stephen Wiltshire himself.




Take a look at them and take a minute to think how much information can your brain storage...

So go make yourself a favor and use it.

Until next time keep clicking,

Rui