Single Flash

The Photos

ISO 400, f/11, 1/125, bounce flash

Nikki Johnson, 23, watches the evening news in shock as the story of an 11-year-old boy from Mokane unfolded. According to the article run by the Missourian, the boy “stole a gunand later shot a school official who was looking for him.” The boy also shot at two other people and missed, and then stole a pick up truck that he drove into a ditch about three miles down the road. South Calloway schools were locked down for about 30 minutes until the boy was arrested. Nikki teaches third grade and coaches the middle school cheer squad in New Franklin. They have had to lock down campus once already this year. New Franklin’s school are all combined into one large school, so she has to worry about the high school and middle school students as well as her own classroom and cheerleaders.

ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/125, direct flash

Wyatt Troesser’s 1st birthday portraits at Shelter Gardens in Columbia.

The Self Critique

I don’t know about this. I don’t like it. I don’t mind the awkwardness. I do mind that I think direct flash right now looks like crap. I can understand some fill, I can understand bounce and making it look good. But, I can’t seem to make direct flash look good. It’s harsh, and I’m just not sure. Maybe there’s a technique that I missed? I know that we have to dial it down, but when I dialed down, it wasn’t enough light to take a picture with. And when I turned it back up, it was either too bright and blown out, or it just didn’t look good. I guess a white subject is going to look whiter with the direct stuff, but man.

The select that I chose was a bounce off of the ceiling. I was sitting on the floor and so was the subject. I think I was zoomed into 55 mm, my ISO was apparently 400, f/11 and 1/125. I thought I was shooting at 100, and I checked, and my metadata says otherwise. I’m sure that most of the assignment was done at 100. Once I got the exposure right on the ceiling bounce I was able to take some good pictures for a few minutes. Then she got up and turned on the lights and that got trickier because I had to figure out what the new exposure was and how to bounce it. I tried the direct flash on a lot of them and I hated the way that they looked so I stuck to the bounce.

The second select of the little boy was a nice portrait, and I used a direct flash on him but I had to dial it way down so that it didn’t blow his face out. It’s still underexposed, but I liked it for the portrait aspect of it. I was upset that the background was gone, but I liked it that it put the focus on him. He didn’t sit still for very long, so I couldn’t really try it again.
I tried to use as many different settings as I could. I would try to dial down the flash, I would try the aperture. When things didn’t look right, I played with it to try to get the exposure correct, but it may just be that I’m not aiming right, I’m not bouncing correctly, or I just haven’t figured out an easy formula for all of this yet. It seems like a lot of trial and error in the beginning, and I feel like mine is mostly error.

The ones that I took outside of the little boy, I was just trying to fill in the dark, shady area that we were in. Some of them were hot, some were underexposed, and I’m not sure that I ever got just the right exposure on any of those. The ones at Varsity Clips were ok. The ceiling was dark and I couldn’t bounce off of that hardly at all. So I was trying to use walls and mirrors and had a lot of trouble. I was trying to talk to people too and figure out where I needed to be standing to get the correct exposure and I still don’t think that I got it.

No matter how many times you let us shoot this assignment, I still think that we are all going to say, I wish I would have shot more. I think that the reason for that is practice. I didn’t want to go shoot something important for this assignment because I was afraid that I was going to miss the “decisive moment.” We get so wrapped up in all of our school work that we forget that we have this really neat tool to play with and don’t take it out unless there is an assignment with it. I should have spent the last month playing with it since I bought it in September, but really I have only taken it out a couple of times and didn’t know what I was doing with it. The wedding ones I shot turned out nice, but I think they would have been better had I known all the math and concepts that I do now. So, yes, I still wish we could have shot more. Sorry. But it’s for practice sake. And I will continue to take this flash out and try to use it more, but that doesn’t help much for what I have to turn in now.