Fire within – a weird flash portrait tutorial

Apparently the term "fire within" is satanic!!!

After reading about the photography contest that Nicolai Brix announced earlier this month, I decided I would have a go and enter a photo of my own. Read on to get a “behind the scenes” look at how I produced the shot…

I’m not really a man for contests as such, but the desire to see what I could do creatively with my speedlights made me go for it.

I had a general idea of what I wanted to do, but this was the first time I made a proof of concept drawing before actually setting up any gear.

Previously I’ve had fun imitating the work of, among others, Rian Flynn and these wide angle shots inspired me to create the final shot.

I wanted to combine the idea of hiding the flash unit in camera like I did in these shots, with the wide angle focal length I used in this shot.

I used my Canon EF-S 18-55mm IS lens at 18 mm on my Canon 1000D mounted on my Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod with the Manfrotto 488RC2 Ballhead in between.

I used all three of my flashes; one Canon 430 EX II, and two Cactus KF-36 manual flash units, all three fired with the Cactus V4 wireless transmitter system.

You can see how I setup the lights in the following two photos taken afterwards.

Notice the Manfrotto tripod at the bottom low enough to get as much sky as possible in the shot

My two KF-36 flashes were mounted to my Walimex lightstands, camera left through a shoot through umbrella, and camera right into a reflective umbrella, both of which also from Walimex.

a Canon 430 EX II flash almost went up in flames!!!

Another shot from the front of the shot to show the Canon 430 EX II flash I mounted inside my Weber One Touch Platinum Grill with a Walimex spring clamp. (I turned of the flash just for this shot, so no to totally blind myself .

I wanted to create the illusion that the grill was going full blaze so placed some wet newspaper over two Weber grill starter cubes to create as thick a smoke as possible to really let it show in the final shot. Luckily the fire didn’t damage my flash unit.

The two flashes on the stands both fired full power (1/1) but the flash inside the grill was set to about 1/2 power.

EXIF: ISO 100 - f/10 - 1/160

I set my camera to its maximum sync speed to kill as much ambient light as possible, with the Cactus its probably 1/250, but to make sure there were no glitches, I set it to 1/160.

Starting out at an aperture of f/14 I finally landed at f/10.

After getting the photograph into Lightroom, I cropped the image slightly to remove an unwanted building camera right, edited the exposure slightly, and finally did some teeth whitening with the Adjustment Brush.

Editing in Photoshop CS3 adding High Pass filter, David Hobby Style.

After a week or so I revisited the photo, after re-reading an article by David Hobby wanting to do something extra with the photo in Photoshop. It’s a technique called High Pass, where you add a layer on top of the image, desaturate it, add a High Pass filter which makes the photo pop out in a 3-D kind of way and then finally blend the two images/layers by changing the oppacity of the top layer until you get the result you’re looking for. Finally added some more sharpening and a tad of contrast in the Develop Module.

What you end up with is this:

Same photo, just added a High Pass filter in CS3

I’ve been trying to decide the “wither too’s and why fors” (a little Lord of The Rings dialog for ya!), but have decided not to enter this new revision of the photo, but stick with the original.

Whether that was a good idea or not, only time will tell…

I’ll be sure to let you guys now how the contest went, keep your fingers crossed.

Related posts:

1. Officials in a flash!
2. Brix flash workshop – I think it’s a review??
3. New member of the clan
4. Portraits with one flash (warning: model not that good looking!…)
5. Rian Flynn interpretation