Day 18 - Photography by candle light

This effort was the result of an experiment in balancing flash with the ambient (candle) light.  I used a single flash with a reflective umbrella to camera left near to the ground.  I had the camera set to manual with f/8 and a 2s exposure.  The flash goes off at the start of the two seconds, freezing the candle stick.  I then waved the camera about like a loon for a bit, causing the flame to leave pretty shapes.  The candle stick doesn't blur much because it isn't getting any light.  Nice.

Some more thoughts on this after the jump...

I started out playing with varying the exposure with a fixed flash power and aperture.  That allowed me to control the look of the candle stick with the flash and the look of the candle with the exposure time.  This is illustrated by these pictures.  Both of these used f.7.1 but the first was 1/250s and the second was 1/5s.  Both were hand held.  Not much difference to the candle stick, which only gets lit by the flash, but the candle light really shows in the second, longer exposure.