Hiking in Ithaca

Last week I went over a pic I took on my way to Ithaca to visit my girlfriend. This week I want to go over a pic that was taken while I was there. It was a great weekend and we spent a lot of time hiking around Ithaca and taking pictures of the waterfalls. Then I was like "Wait! I need to take a pic of you hun!". She is awesome and doesn't mind when I want her to model. So this is the shot that I came up with. What do you think? Isn't she beautiful?! I think so :) I wanted it to look like something out of a hiking magazine or maybe an ad for Northface...haha!

1) Off camera flash - The way I got this photo was with off camera flash. We were in a valley that was blocking the sun, so we were in a good amount of shade, but the waterfall was still lit nicely by the sun. At first I tried the shot without the flash and I got her sillouette. Then I remembered I had my flash! I read a lot of Strobist and the guys at that site swear by off camera flash and for good reason. Basically, direct flash blows. Well I shouldn't say that, it's good for some things, but if you want to add dimension to the lighting off camera is the way to go. If you want to learn more about lighting, go to Strobist. The guys over there are great and there is a lot to be learned there. I brought my Canon 580EX and I was holding it camera left as high as I could reach. My camera was on a tripod which helped with this one. I triggered the flash with Elinchrom Skyport triggers.

2) Setting up the exposure - This exposure was fairly easy. I started by metering for the waterfall in the background without my girl in the shot. Then I underexposed about one stop to bring out the blues in the sky. Once I got a nice exposure I just added the flash. The flash was in manual mode so I just dialed in a power level that exposed her properly. This takes some guessing at first, but it's fairly easy to find the right exposure.

Hope this helps with your environmental portraiture...here's a diagram of how I set things up...