Single Strobe Sessions

Patty (aka Frances Ann)

*Starting with this post, I will leave out the category to which the article belongs to in the title (because they can often get too long for my taste), since these can be accessed via the links on the navbar on the left. If you need a reintroduction to the Travelling Light series, you can check out its premise here.

Patty is an old soul. In fact, to be more accurate, I should say she is a fellow old soul. And one of the drawbacks of being such is that you are simultaneously aware of two things:

1. Life is unfair (and often crappy).
2. There’s rarely anything you can do about number 1.

I know, I know. I’m being cynical, but you have to admit — I’m also being realistic. Okay, some of you might say that you can always control how you react to life’s pricks and barbs. Well, that is true. But, unless you can exhibit some form of mind control over your emotionally-draining, soul-sucking co-worker, then good luck with that.

In her soul-searching, Patty may still be paddling her boat in the churning seas, but I hope she presses on, finds her beacon and gets herself on land soon.

A glimmer of hope light can be found after the jump.

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This is the last and my personal favorite from the series of portraits I shot that day. It’s a complementary mix of ambient light and flash. The lighting bullet points are detailed below.

• I had the flash set at 1/4th power, since I was shooting at an aperture of f/5.6. Coupled with a shutter speed of 1/160 s (ISO 400,I believe), I was able to knock ambient light down by at least two stops.
• I had the DIY grid (The price-to-performance ratio of this thing can’t be beat!) on to selectively light my subject.
• The VAB 1979 held it angled down on upper camera right.

I’m not sure what I’ll come up with next, but I hope the momentum I’ve gathered with these series of posts will inspire me to press on.

More to come…