PHATO Productions

I’ve always wanted to do a shot of a persons profile with a dark background. I’m sure their are a bunch of ways to do this, but I figured out one way that I really liked. I recently purchased a Nikon D80 Digital SLR camera, and I love it. A few days later I found that my Canon 580ex flash didn’t really work well with the camera so I purchased a Nikon SB-800. The Nikon flash blows away the Canon and it is about $200 cheaper. Anyhow, before I explain how I set this shot up I would like to let you know if you didn’t already that the Nikon Creative Lighting System is spectacular. The D80 has a featured called Advanced Wireless Lighting. The SB-800 flash supports this feature excellently. What it allows you to do is use the built in flash on the D80 as a commander and the SB-800 as the slave. So the D80 can trigger the SB-800. I used this feature in the shot I’m showing you here.

What I did was I had my friend get a nice big lung full of hookah smoke and then blow it out gradually. I then had my wife hold the SB-800 behind his head so that I could not see it through the D80’s viewfinder. I set the D80 and SB-800 up in wireless mode. I then gave my camera a faster shutter speed of 1/200. This faster shutter speed allowed me to capture the smoke in a still form rather than getting motion blur on it. I set my iso to 200 and my aperture to f/5. This gave me a crisp picture. I set the exposure compensation on the D80’s flash down 2 stops and set it on the SB-800 up 2 stops. This caused the background to not show up as much from the D80’s flash and the SB-800 helped emphasize the smoke and the lines of my friends profile. I zoomed in a little with my nikkor 18mm-135mm lens and then composed the shot. I was now ready to set my focus and take the shot.

When I took the shot, the SB-800 was trigger by the D80’s on camera flash and as you can see the image came out remarkably. Now don’t get me wrong, I had tons of trial and error shots to get the effect that I wanted. After all is said and done, I think this shot came out beautifully, and just the way I had expected and predicted it to.

Go ahead and take some shots like this one and leave them in the comments for me, I would love to see what you all come up with.

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