Blending, Balancing and Pop Flash

Here's what I came up with this week. This one is balancing.



Caption:
Sarah Minton, 24, (right) and Jessica Nesselhauf, 25, man the bake station table in Middlebush Hall on MU’s campus. They are part of the Association of MPA Students that is working to raise money for a program called Shop with a Cop. The program is trying to raise about $1,000 so that ten elementary school children from Columbia’s Field Elementary School can go shopping this holiday season for themselves and their families with a local law enforcement officer. The children in most cases will be low income and may have a family member incarcerated. According to Minton and Nesselhauf, the idea is to show the kids that the cops aren’t the bad guys and they still care about their families and the community they live in.

Critique:
For my select I chose one of the balancing photos. I was out wandering and went into Middlebush Hall where I found these two girls sitting at a bake sale table. So I asked if I could take their picture and then found out what they were doing there and that turned out to be really interesting after I was done shooting. When I approached the situation, I just saw interesting light, not interesting content. However, I can get a solid caption out of this and realistically could go find them and make a holiday story out of it. However, technique first. I balanced it with the light from the outside. I did have a big problem with lens flare. I saw it, and I was having trouble avoiding it and moving around it since I don’t have a hood. I shot this at ISO 200, f/10, and 1/160. I didn’t gel my flash, and I used ETTL at full power for some of them and stopped down 1/3 to 2/3’s on others. I think this one was at full power because I was a little further away from the face that needed to be lit.
I really liked the technique but I was really caught up on content. I liked working with the blending and pop flash a lot more. It’s more fun to be creative with things like that than just filling, but I know that the filling and balancing is going to get me further in life and be used more. Some of the soccer and volleyball photos were not done correctly because my flash decided to die on me and I didn’t realize it, so I had to shuffle some batteries to make it happen.


Here's another one that I liked and I'll consider it more of a pop flash or maybe even some panning. I liked it. It's down at the Rec Center where some guys were shooting some basketball before I was going to play volleyball.