Very nice, Ed.  Thanks for pointing me to it.   I never saw your old site but this one is done very well.
 I particularly like how the information screen pops up but does not redirect you away from the galleries.  I also liked being able to turn the picture movement off in the galleries - movement distracts me from the work.

I enjoyed looking at your work as well.  it has me thinking things about how some of the images were made.  (One example - on the picture shooting up at a boy on a big rock did you use a reflector or some fill flash?  I'm guessing reflector.)  You'll have to forgive me - I'm in that insatiable learning mode right now.

Very well done!

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Thanks guys!

Tank-M, that particular shot is 'strobist' style, overcoming the ambient with an SB-800 strobe. Metered the back ground light -1 stop and filled with the strobe.

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baument wrote (View Post):

Thanks guys!

Tank-M, that particular shot is 'strobist' style, overcoming the ambient with an SB-800 strobe. Metered the back ground light -1 stop and filled with the strobe.

That was my second guess.  Do you set the flash manually or let the camera decide?  You did such a perfect job balancing the light.  (I've been practicing this lately - I have to do it manual if I want to be off camera.)

Pretty much everything is manual in a shot like this.

Like all things photographic it's a matter of managing compromises.  You really just have to remember that you've got two light sources to manage, the ambient (the sun in this case) and your strobe. The simplest way to explain it without going into the various scenarios that you can use is to figure out what you want to maintain. Do you want to maintain a shutter speed of 250th? If so, then meter your background at 250th, determine the proper aperture for that shutter speed (let's say it's f11), underexpose your background by a stop or so (f16), and adjust your strobe to give you a proper foreground exposure (in manual).

The usual problem that people have in this scenario is that their strobe doesn't have enough power to overcome the high level of ambient and the small apertures required to hold the light at that setting. The only real solution for that is more power (insert Tim Allen grunt here), because you have to maintain the small aperture to hold the ambient where you need it. The best solution in that case is to add additional strobes or, if it's not a spontaneous situation, shoot later in the day when you can open up the aperture a little bit.

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