Michael, Night

Michael Night, originally uploaded by DrFireball.

Can't claim that the idea for this one was entirely original, but then I suppose few ideas truly are.

In essence I taped two strobes (a canon 580 exII and a cheap sunpak 430 clone) into the roof of an elinchrom umbrella. I attached a pocket wizard and headed off to Leeds.

First truly urban shoot that I've done and pretty much as expected we had a few passers-by but nothing out of order, One bloke did ask if we were police (Mike's suit possibly - either that or a guilty conscience!) and then couldn't seem to grasp what we were up to.

I then used the quadras to give a touch of fill so that the suit and brolly didn't get lost in the darkness. I set the camera (5dII) up on a tripod and used live view to compose the shot (as the camera was higher than me!). Worked rather well.

There was a lot of ambient light and the trick was not to blur too much of Mike's right face. Ended up using a 17 second (or so) exposure using bulb mode and a remote shutter cable. I used a high f number - around 16 or so to get the stars on the street lights. Didn't bother trying to use a light meter on Mike, rather set the falsh output manually and readjusted according to the highlight alert on the camera. Ended up with 1/16 flash output from each strobe.

At one point an ambulance went past and the light trails were great but the exposure on Mike not so - such is the hit and miss nature of this type of shot.

I am used to taking around 150-200 shots on a locaation shoot, however this time amazingly 8-9 shots and we were done - did have work the next day!

Cheers

DrF