Strobing out the sun

There is a popular belief that flash photography is for shooting at night or when the ambient light is insufficient to allow you to capture a moment clearly. While this is not a misconception, it is also not a rule. in fact, using flash in the harshest of light can yield some pretty cool results.

My initial plan on this photo shoot was to go take some shots of a horse that is kept stabled in a very beautiful location near my house. I took my dog, Reef along for her morning walk in order to kill two bird with one stone, only to find that the horse was not on location. Not wanting to waste all the drive I had built up, I set reef up under a tree and took some pictures.

My first challenge was to find a way to capture Reef's black fur in a shadowed area without silhouetting her against the bright morning sky. I had three options with the kit I had brought with me:

1. Expose the shot for Reef and in doing so over expose or "blow out" the sky.
2. Expose for the sky and use flash to fill in Reef.
3. Use my ND filter (Neutral Density) to darken the background and my strobe (flash) to fill in the foreground with light.

I went with option three and was pleasantly surprised with some of the results.

For this shot I used an adjustable ND filter that allows me to control how many stops of light I want to remove from the shot. I also used a Nikon Speedlight SB-700 Strobe off camera to fill the scene at about 1/4 power.