Got it. My take on the altF version of painting with light.

Spent five minutes setting up and shooting, so it’s not perfect. But it was way too cold outside for perfection. Especially when your subject is a bear. However I intend to test and develop (ie have fun experimenting with) the technique at the next Muse session.

For those just tuning in, I wanted to try out John Michael Cooper’s version of painting with light, without paying the annual fees of photographymentor.com. Especially since, from the teaser video on Cooper’s blog, I had an idea how he did it. While he may have a much more streamline process, this is how I built the shot:

Set the camera up on a tripod and got the PocketWizards out. Normal exposure without flash (image on left) was f8/200 at iso 100. I stopped down to f16/200 to get a nice dramatic sky. I then set my flash at 1/2 power, zoomed in all the way. Then, as my mom obligingly hung out in the cold and clicked the camera’s shutter, I moved around the bear and held the flash at different angles. We shot eight images. Back inside, I opened Photoshop and layered the photos in a single file, giving each layer a mask. Then I painted in the bits of each image that added the best light. And bam — a daylight version of painting with light, or a multi-flash image done with one strobe. Pretty cool stuff.

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