The idea for Lexi and the Denver skyline came from Joe McNally’s Hot Shoe Diaries book. If you haven’t read that book I would highly recommend you go get the dang thing. It shows you how you can use those little flashes such as the Canon 580ex or Nikon SB900 to create some really nice looking images. Granted Joe is a major Nikon proponent I suspect you could do the exact same images with Canon gear. The chapter that inspired me was about shooting and elf or something with a city scape in the background. Basically it was an image of a girl with a hoodie and the city scape all blue’ish like. While I was reading the book I also was in conversations with Lexi’s mom, which is my boss as well at my day job, about getting some unique senior portraits for her daughter. You typically don’t see senior portraits like this image and I wanted to try something very different.
The critical item with this image was the time window of good light. The window was only about 10 minutes as the sun was setting behind me. During this critical window the sky was turning from daylight blue to night time black. By setting the white balance of the camera to tungsten and double gelling the single Nikon SB-900 with CTS filters made the sky go all deep blue. I also dragged the shutter as you can see from the car lights streaming in the background. Lexi is sharp because the flash exposure was only like 1/1000th of second on her face but the overall exposure was 1 1/3 seconds. I did have the camera on a tripod to keep the building lights a bit more crisp. The single SB-900 in the Lastolite Ezybox was triggered with another SB-900 in commander mode on top of my camera.
During the shoot the SB-900 in the softbox did a thermal shutdown, which has never happened to me before. Apparently it was pumping out light at almost full power and I was taking a ton of images because I only had one chance for this image.
Uploaded by mark.mortensen on 2 Nov 09, 10.28PM MST.
