Loading...
Part 3 are the New Year's Eve festivities in the Yim household.
The back story is that I've never played with sparklers or fireworks. Ever. I guess my parents were always afraid I'd blow my hands off or something, which might go a long way towards helping the reader understand why I'm so risk-averse as an adult. <-- wow, I just called myself an adult. In the second photo above, you can see my opinion of sparklers. However, I will admit that they are utterly safe, or at least about as safe as matches (which I was also not allowed to have but came to love at the Institute).
I mentioned this to the Old, who told me "Oh yeahh, I real afraid of [cantonese word for gunpowder] like that, yeahhh." Then she sort of disappeared around the corner. Later I discovered that she was unloading literally a crate's worth of the gunpowder pop-pop things that you're meant to throw one at a time. She carefully filtered out the sawdust/paper scrap storage matrix, and then showed up with a double-handful of the stuff and threw it right at the ground. Scared the bejeezus out of everybody. Then she broke down in gales of laughter. That granny has a real sense of humor. Now I understand why she's afraid of the pop-pops.
On the photo front, I was reading through The Hotshoe Diaries, by Joe McNally. This is a great book for thinking about using hotshoes, which is all I have and all I'm willing to carry around. His colloquial style is not exactly my favorite, but if you can tolerate the corniness, I think there are a couple good take-home messages. Other issues are his emphasis on using TTL on the Nikon system; having no TTL compatible Canon flashes, things are not as simple for me. Nevertheless, again, the principle is similar, and if you don't mind shuttling back and forth and changing the custom flash dial incrementally, I think a lot of the effect can be replicated.
For this set, I was just trying a simple thing from the beginning of the book, which is a shooting stance where you use your right hand to manage the camera, balance the camera on the left shoulder, and loop the left arm around to hold up a hotshoe flash. This is an awkward stance, but is just about the only thing I've seen for steadying the camera while taking the flash off-axis. The problem is that at close ranges, the flash is not necessarily well- or consistently-aimed, which of course is inherent in any handheld setting. In exchange for the low consistency, I could do things like under-lighting the Old while she collects a hoard of pop-pops.
The other thing of relevance is the attempt to balance a flash while retaining most of the feel of the ambient light. For the sparklers, it means trying to drag the shutter to integrate the path of the magnesium bits flying off while lighting most of the subject with the flash. For the later shots (temporally unrelated) at Ala Moana with Joanne in a baobab tree, this means balancing fill flash with the very warm and highly directional sunset light. Finally, I try inverting the balance so that the flash is providing main light while the sunset is providing fill. The goal was to get color contrast between Joanne and the tree. In this image, I also try out the trick of putting a full CTO on the flash head and setting white balance to tungsten. The flash should now have the color of sunset, roughly. However, the actual sunset light is much cooler than tungsten, and paints the remainder of the scene blue.
