Flash ah ah.....

There's a new challenge over at the Forever Friends challenge blog and the challenge this time is to use a Christmas song... here's my offering..

At the moment I'm bearly seing the light of day, it's dark when I leave for work and dark when I get home so my photography is severely limited at the moment. So the only alternative is long exposures with a tripod or getting busy with some flash - this is one of my favourite Christmas ornaments - who can resist a bit of glitz at Christmas? I finally use the Liveview on my 40D for the first time and it really does make nailing focus a cinch for close-up shots. I was decidedly sceptical, but I'm a convert!

For a while now I've been wanting to get some off camera lighting and rather than invest in studio (continuous or flash) lighting I've taken the plunge with a set of wireless flash triggers for my speedlite. It means you can get a bit more creative with the angle and amount of flash. This shot (which is by no means perfect!! was lit with the speedlite on the right hand side of the shot and it straight away adds a bit of drama and interest.

Once I'd got the Speedlite off the camera you loose the thru-the-lens metering so you have to control the flash manually - a whole now world to learn which is quite exciting!

This is a page from the weekend (November SC) and features one my recent favourite pics of Martha - I took it when I was aiming to get some Christmas card pictures (hats and antlers!!) but Martha much preferred posing without!