Minnesota Photography

Recently a friend directed me to opencultures website.  This site provides links to over 700 free college classes, many of which are offered by leading schools in the US.  Having a little bit of free time these days I decided to brush up on my photography skills, as I had been getting board with the pictures from my camera.  After perusing the Strobist blog, and decided to skip ahead to the part of the class on lighting. I have an external flash, and recently purchased two Pocket Wizards but hadn't had time to learn how to use them.  My initial pictures would occasionally turn out half obscured.

While previewing the test pictures of my harry feet, I realized I was looking at an image of the delay between my flash and the camera's shutter. The flash was going off just a fraction of a second after the camera had released the shutter to close.  Being a physicist, I quickly realized I could calculate, to a close approximation, the delay time on my Pocket Wizards.  I was shooting in ISO 200, f7.1 and just had to adjust the shutter speed till only a small fraction of the picture was opaqued.  At 1/320 my picture was about 1/3 opaqued, meaning the flash was going off just as the shutter was closing.  As one of my favorite former professors would have said; 'between friends', lets call this the exact moment the shutter went off.  Meaning that my flash was about .003 seconds behind my camera.  

I quickly understood the basics of the remotes and flash and decided to practice on a more interesting subject, my little brother. 

It was a lot of fun shooting my little bro while he did backflips and other acrobatics.  He is shockingly comfortable upside-down while air-born, and quite good at striking some interesting poses.  After a couple of shots (170!) I decided to have a little fun with tracers.  

We took 4 headlamps and put them on his hands and feet.  I set the camera for a longer exposure, and delayed the flash.  The result was some really interesting pictures of Christian with the light trails highlighting his motion.  I plan on experimenting a little more with this, but am glad I got some neat shots while learning to use my new photography techniques and toys.