Well, with daylight savings time there has been a lot more daylight to work with after work. So, I thought I'd take tonight as an opportunity to try a sunset shoot using fill flash.
The result failed for a few reasons:
1) The sunset wasn't very impressive. It was still a little early when I took the photo, but it was obvious it wasn't instantly going to turn into a good one.
2) The background is distracting. This was a composition issue and if I thought I'd be able to get a winner out of it, I would have tried something else, but it was clear it was a fail, because...
3) My poor choice of flash. I decided to try off-camera and bare. Either one on it's own might have been okay, but that combination plus poor flash position resulted in some hard shadows that made for an unflattering picture.
So, this post is all about what not to do. At least you can see the hard shadow a bare flash (at 1/16 power no less) produced when shot off-camera to the right and pointing slightly up. Shooting head-on with a flash on-camera would have helped with the shadows here--although a head-on direct flash usually doesn't produce very interesting results when it's the only light source in front of the subject.
Anyway, if I were really determined to try and salvage the shoot, I'd have made the aperture smaller so the sky wasn't as overexposed as well as either moving the flash so the shadows weren't going up and across her face, or pointing it up more so that it wasn't as hard a light. But instead, I decided posting a failure was just as good.
Olympus E-620 @ 50mm, f2.8, 1/200, ISO 100. Strobist: Bare 285HV low camera right @ 1/16 power.
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