It’s a two-for-one week!  I totally forgot the Strobist Boot Camp II Assignment 4 shot was due tomorrow (9/21) so I figured I could used this shot for both my personal Project 52 and for my Assignment 4 shot.  Don’t like it?  Tough!

I have a few other similar shots in the works for the next few weeks – been wanting to play with some longer exposures with flash mixed in, so I went with that concept for this shot.  It would be a perfect way to show motion but at the same time utilize the stopping power of flash. After a couple test shots I realized this shot wasn’t going to go exactly how I wanted, but it created a neat effect that I decided to role with.

Using a long shutter speed caused some ambient to burn in where my flash subject was eventually going to be, which caused some ghosting of the flash-lit portions of the image.  That’s ok with me for this shot, because it definitely shows motion – and since the theme for this shot is “what moves you” I figured that would be perfect.  To me, this picture shows several components – it shows motion, but it also shows that each moment is both individual and changing.  The flash freezes the moment, while at the same time blending previous moments from the ambient.  So each moment is precious, but an individual moment is part of a bigger picture, both past and present.  At least that’s how I’m going to look at it.

I needed a pretty slow speed to create some good light trails and still illuminate the city in the background, so I went with a pretty high aperture (f/9) to give me a 1/2 second shutter speed at ISO 400.  I started with 2-4 second shutter speeds but that caused too much ambient to mix with the flash, so I backed it off some.  This was a 3-flash setup: 2 for the car and 1 for the driver.

I used an SB-800 and SB-26 at full power about 10 feet from the car at their max zooms to light up and freeze the car.  Then I set up an SB-600 inside of the car, super-clamped to the passenger side door handle and aiming at the driver – it was set to 1/4 power to light up the driver.  Here is the setup shot:

I knew CLS wouldn’t work for this for multiple reasons, so I went with my old Cactus radio triggers. They worked pretty well for me here.

That’s about it for this shot.  Oh, as a side note, random people don’t like you “flashing” their cars as they drive by – I had two different cars stop and yell at me while I was setting up for this shot before I had my roommate drive around for me.

But, I live to shoot again another day!