"Blowing In The Wind"

"Blowing In The Wind"
© David A. Ziser

This image was made on Monday during my Dave Cross Workshop. We had dropped down to the water walk which offered some gorgeous natural light for many of the images I shot.  I wanted to do something different though.  I wanted to turn the bride’s face away from the  natural direction of light and light her with flash from the other direction.

I placed a small radio triggered shoe mount flash on the ledge camera left.  This image gets kind of interesting when you hear how I pulled off the interesting “Hollywood” spot lighting on the bride. 

I chose to use, are you ready, a 1/500 second shutter speed!  Using this faster shutter speed only exposed the top section of the camera's CMOS sensor during the exposure where the bride’s head was placed leaving the rest of the scene unaffected by the flash. 

The finished result shows an almost spotlighted lighting effect on our bride allowing the rest of the scene to go about 2 stops darker.  Kind of cool, don’t you think?

Anyway, I love how the image came out.  And, guess what, I discovered a brand new way to make my lighting exciting.

Camera specs: Canon 7D fitted with 70-200mm IS lens at 200mm, F 8.0 @ 1/500 second, ISO 200.  Enjoy!  -David