Tuesday, March 11, 2008

“Easy Elegance”
© David A. Ziser

I’m posting this image because of the technique that went into it. When working in a church and trying to preserve the detail in the stain glass window along with the detail in shadows of key parts of the image, particularly those on the subject and the background of the scene usually requires quite the balancing act with the shutter speed. Too fast – you capture the detail of the stain glass window and lose the details in the shadows. Too slow and you get the shadow detail, but blow out the detail and color in the window.

I chose a shutter speed just fast enough to hold the detail in the window, and just a bit of detail in the shadows. A faster shutter speed would have made the shadows too dark on my bride, so the 1/15 second was the right choice here. My problem was that the mural behind the bride went way too dark. I used my remotely fired Quantum flash at about ¼ power to raise the light level of the mural to balance the tonalities nicely in the overall composition of the scene. The beautiful “loop lighting” on the bride was created with a second remotely fired strobe positioned appropriately to my right. Camera specs; Canon 5D fitted with 24-105mm lens at 24mm, F 5.6 @ 1/15 second, ISO 800. Enjoy! -David

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