P365 Jun09: Painted frog

I've been inspired by the Strobist blog to try and get more out of my flash, and practice some of the techniques described there. For this shot I tried a number of new things. It's not a terribly interesting subject but it did the job :)

The frog is illuminated with a single flash. To get the different angles lit that you can see here, I used a technique called "light painting". I totally darken the room, set the camera to a 30 second shutter time, and I manually trigger the flash's "modeling" mode from a variety of angles. The modeling mode is a rapid series of relatively low-powered bursts of light.

To help keep the light from the flash on the subject and prevent it from illuminating the background or spilling into the lens and flaring, I created a "snoot" from a cereal box. This helped quite a lot! Also, in order to give the coloured lights effect, I "gelled" the flash with different materials for each burst. For the main lighting to the front and left, I put some green tissue paper in front of the flash. For the rear right light I used some red cellophane :)

So lots of new tricks tired in this shot! Need lots more practice, but I look forward to seeing what I can do with these!