Lighting three sides with one flash

[abarickman]

I did not think up this technique but used it today for the first time so I thought I would share.

A long time back I found this strange thing (BBQ?) down by the river. I photographed it a while back and called it the "Weed Throne". I wanted to go back and shoot it again at dusk but try something new this time. Today I went back and took my 430EX flash and remote trigger. I only have one flash so this is a composite of 3 shots where I painted it with 3 flashes in three different shots. The first shot was with the flash inside it. The second was from the front and the third was from the left side. What I mean is that I put my camera on my tripod set the timer clicked the shutter and then walked with the flash in my hand and pointed it at the structure. I did this with varying strength flashes so that I would have some choices in post processing. I think I ended up taking 9 shots of which I used three for the final composite.

For post processing I opened the first shot in PS CS3. I then opened up another shot that I wanted to take the flash from. I pasted the second shot into a new layer on top of the first shot. I selected both and auto-aligned the layers. I then selected the top layer and created a layer mask (hide all). This hid the top layer and only showed the bottom layer. Now I used my brush set to white and painted the parts of the image that I wanted the flash to be revealed. Once I liked the results I merged the layers and repeated this process for the other photo. Lastly I took it into Lightroom and tweaked it a bit more.

It is not the most thilling photo in the world but I learned a lot doing it and will put this technique to much better use in the future.



I have attached the starting shot so that you can see the affect of the front and side flashes.

[cerious22]

Thats a pretty cool Technique. Thanks for Sharing!

[Glayva]

I like this technique in PS and thanks,too, for sharing. I have some night shots around my town that I want to take in the near future, so will try this on one or two I have in mind.
As a separate issue, I notice you have a band of corrupted image near the top of your image. I'll ask a silly question, but do you see this as well? If so, then I'm not the only one having this problem with uploads to DPS.

[abarickman]

Hello and thanks. Yeah I look forward to using this to better affect soon. I think I need the ambient lower and then maybe gel the light inside the structure to a red.

I do see that on my upload. I did not do anything special with the upload so I do think it is a DPS issue.