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Hi there good morning it's Ingrid Owens here from the CameraShy Take52 Challenge and www.
BeginnersPhotographyBlog.com and this week our theme was Ancient and the blog had a ton
of ancient images on there.Everybody did a really good job with the theme and this week
I decided to choose a photograph that I hope will inspire some of the newer challengers
and newer to photography and this picture is from Bobbi Love and you can check out Bobbi's
Blog at www.BobbiLove.me I really enjoyed this picture and really stood out from the
rest because it was something completely different. It was very on theme and obviously it has
to do with fire and you know fire is a very ancient thing but Bobbi uses some techniques
here that are probably familiar to a lot our challengers and so I just thought we would
take a minute to go through. Some of the terminology and some of the technique that he used just
so that it can inspire you and I really do love this shot and I think that it's very
executed and a great idea. So, let's have a look, so what Bobbi is doing here is that
he has a sparking fire starter kit. I believe because I read his blog post and
so he is making this sparks of light and he use a 40mm prime lens. Now what he means by
a prime lens is a fixed lens at 40mm so many of you may have just a kit lens that comes
with your digital SLR and you can zoom that back and form but with this prime lens you
can't zoom it's 40mm, what you see is what you get and it's a nice size of a frame and
it is a little tighter than what you see through the eye ordinarily
but it is a really nice perspective. So there's no zoom there involve and he obviously used
a self timer as well and so technically he used the timer, he took several shots before
getting it right. His shutter speed here was .3 seconds which has a very slow shutter speed
and by using that it has allow him to show this trails of light coming out from this
sparks and right here so that what adds to the dynamics of the picture. But he also used
his flash off the camera so he has a stand alone flash. I think he said he has a 430EX
and he had the flash positioned over here so you can see the flash has lighted up his
hands and is lighting up some of the back of the fireplace here as well, so it's not
getting rid of the slow shutter speed it's not overpowering light that is coming out
of this sparks but it's just enough to freeze the action on his hands and he said that he
had set his flash to 1/32 so that he has that 132 of a power. So when you use a flash or
stand alone flash off of your camera you have the ability to control the power that you
are using so that you don't have to use it at full force, you can reduce the quantity
of the light that is coming out so he's got a dead on here, I think. His aperture was
set to 7.1 which has a sharp enough aperture to get everything in focus that he want to
get in focus so you know just kind of slightly sharper than what you would get with something
like a 5.6, it's got a little bit of focus going around here and he manually focus the
camera. He could do that because it's very dark obviously he wanted the darkness and
if he had to use auto focus it wouldn't have really find the focus but also he is shooting
a 7.5 the manual focus allowed him a little bit of wiggle room so he had a bit of room
for error if it needed that way because obviously you don't know where these guys are gonna
go and you want everything to be shot in focus and so from a composition point I think it's
perfect, the flash coming over here is a little distracting but not overly so, your eyes are
definitely taken right here and then they kind of follow the lines around which you
know it's excellent and it would be impossible to know that this was taken in the fire grid
other than the fact that he had shared his technique in his blog post, I mean that is
really interesting. I maybe would have love to see more a bit of the hands rather than
being cropped out on this side, but you know I'm just being picky, I think it's a really
good shot and thank you very much for sharing. Thank you for taking the time to explain the
process to people that are just starting out. So, I hope that has given you some food for
thought and the theme again here was ancient and you know it is very interesting to try
and capture something that is a bit out of the box and think out of the box. This is
something so simple and so basic and it can be achieved in your own home. You may not
have that remote flash but you know it is certainly is a worthwhile experiment. You
could easily get the shot without the flash, without showing the hands so I won't say easily,
I'm just saying that it's duable without the flash. So don't let the gear be the one from
taking good pictures. So, thank you once again and you can check out Bobbi's blog at www.bobbilove.me
and if your interested in joining this challenge and you are not yet a participant please check
out the link below this video. Until next week, thank you! bye!