Autumnal wanderings (part 1) with flash…

Recently I’d managed to fit in a quick evening scouting trip to Colwick Woods , Nottingham to take a check on the state of the trees in anticipation of an upcoming nature photo set soon. With the evening light I’d decided it might be fun to play around a little with my SB-80dx pocket flash.

On the ground there so happened one of the leaves in particular was screaming out to have a picture out of it…. (above). As it happened the idea to pan the camera arisen out of a dead end – I’d hoped to perhaps make the leaf “pop” from the background with focused flash , but I wasn’t able to get the tight flash direction I’d needed with what I had…

The second image below is one where I’d decided to concentrate on raking the flash across the bed of leaves to make them look more three-dimensional and draw attention to the textures on the leaves.

The end of the evening was spent trying to see if I could light the trees up myself with just one flash – I’d managed it quite well though it did take a fair bit of work….

The trick with this was that this is that what you see is actually the end result of a complicated jigsaw puzzle made of about 15 pieces . In each piece I aimed my flash at one particular part of the scene , be it the tree trunks , the foliage or the ground – and brought them together using the magic of computer software!

I actually took just over 25 images separately as you can see in this screenshot of Lightroom and brought them together with layer masks in Photoshop. (decided not to use 10 of them – it’s useful to shoot more then you need on the scene). Yellow is the working file (with layers) , with blue the final edited image above.