It’s the beginning of a new month… which means that it’s time to move on to a new focus for what I’m doing in my free time.
There are so many things to learn in this world and so many skills that can be developed that if you try and conquer learning about all of your interests at once, you will end up so spread out that it’s hard to do anything well.
To make my life skills a little more focused, I’ve decided that every month I’m going to try and learn more about one specific skill, or interest, as well as putting into practice whatever is associated with that skill set.
Since today is the first day of May, that means that yesterday was the last day of April. April’s topic for me was off-camera lighting for photography. and I had a lot of lighting assignments to get caught up on from the Strobist: Lighting 102 course that I had been working my way though.
Wednesday night I finished watching the Strobist Lighting Seminar DVD set that I had started a couple of weeks ago which goes through most of the same material as the online Strobist: Lighting 102 “course” does (which is a series of blog entries that David Hobby put together to help teach lighting.)
I didn’t quite do all of the assignments from the course in order, but I worked on what I could, and here is what I ended up with.
Lighting 102 - 3.1 Balancing Light: Twilight

Balancing Light: Twilight - Mr. Matt was a great model while standing waiting for someone to toss him the Frisbee.
For the photo of Matt here, I lit him from the front right with a Nikon SB-80 Speedlight. With the Speedlight, Matt’s exposure in relation to the sky was easy to control. The flash that was lighting him was seemingly instant, which allowed me to get proper exposure on him right away, and the sky was then able to burn into the image while the shutter was still open with a longer shutter speed. Matt didn’t get over exposed because while the sky was burning in, there was no light on him… once the flash had fired, he went dark for the rest of the exposure, but the initial image of him at the proper exposure was captured in that brief instant. Continue Reading »