Light Painting & SB-700 on Hunting Equipment

After having success taking photographs of hunting equipment in the dark with the new speedlight and posting the images, I discovered I didn’t take any horizontal shots so the basement was turned into a studio once again. But this time, I experimented with lighting painting as well. Light painting involves shooting in total darkness and using a flashlight to expose the image by using long exposure times and waving the flashlight over your subject.

I placed the D90 on the Slik tripod close to my hunting equipment and used the 18-105mm lense. I turned the focus and VR off on the lense and set the aperture between f11 and f14 for these shots. The SB-700 Speedlight was used on some of the images while a small LED key chain light was used for light painting. When I was doing the light painting, I changed the camera to Manual and used 15 seconds as an exposure time.
 

The RAW files were processed in ViewNX with white balance and picture control adjustments. The white balance was changed to either direct sunlight or shade while the picture control was customized with the nature-landscape and monchr_g+con settings.

To finalize the images, PSE8 was used by using the clone brush tool to remove unwanted items from the image. The dodge and burn tool was also used to tweak the exposure on certain areas of the image.

The toughest design of this shoot was getting myself in the right position and getting the look of my eyes to be what I wanted them to be while I was blowing the duck call. Hopefully you can feel that a flock of late season mallards are starting to commit to the decoys.

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