On the rocks

I've been experimenting with lighting a lot lately, and this was from a brief portrait session on a pile of rocks by the Atlantic Ocean in Big Talbot Island State Park.

The algae on the rocks was absolutely ELECTRIC in color, but I didn't want it to distract from the beautiful model. So I turned up the flash level and turned down the exposure. This made the model the most significant piece of the photo, but still showed the background.

On a how-I-was-thinking note, I was feeling a bit rushed so I didn't take the time to manually set the camera controls. Instead, I used program mode and exposure compensation. This worked great, though, and I might use it more often in the future.

The sun was coming down hard from camera right high, so I held the flash at arms length up high facing the model's face. This put most of the light on the upper half of the body and helped fill in some of the sun-induced harsh shadows.

In PP, I did some exposure correction and burning around the corners to further bring down the background, plus very minimal sharpening on the eyes. No other adjustments were made.

For this shot I used my 28-80mm f/3.3-4.5 lens. I much prefer the 50mm f/1.8 for portraits, but the rocks were quite precarious and lacked good footholds so a zoom was necessary to get the shots I wanted. It's a pretty sharp lens, nonetheless, and worked just fine.

Camera Model: NIKON D50
Flash Used: Yes; Vivitar 285hv, 1/2 power, through LumiQuest SoftBox III
Focal Length: 28.0mm
Exposure Time: 0.0025 s (1/400)
Aperture: f/11.0
ISO equiv: 200
Exposure Bias: -1.67
Metering Mode: Center Weight
Exposure: program (Auto)