Hay Fight!

Deepwell Farms in Saint James had its annual Harvest Celebration this past weekend. Took the boys over to do some pumpkin painting, tour the Deepwells house (lots and lots of photo opps in that place) and jump in and out of this huge pile of Hay on the grounds.

Of course it took 30 seconds for the hay to start flying. And brothers being brothers, they chased, taunted and flung bales of it at each other.

Problem was, capturing the fun is a photographic nightmare… bright, bright sun, deep shadows, midday crappy light. Nothing romantic, just blasting sunlight across the scene.

How do you solve this problem? 

Hi-speed synch. Running and gunning is always tough, not sure of the exposure and you are really trusting the brains of the camera to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Set the aperture to f5.6, placed a diffused sb900 on my hotshoe and let ttl work its magic (for those of you out there, ttl stands for “through-the-lens” metering… the flash calculates its exposure via what the camera is seeing… simple enough right? NOT. As usual, its never that simple. See, blasting a flash on the scene will wash it out completely (they call it “fill” flash for a reason) so I set my EV (exposure compensation) down about 1-2 stops, and played with it all in-between… this is a global setting, darkening the entire scene a bit (which in harsh, brutal sun, you need to) then played with my flash settings from +.07-+1.0 EV in the flash…  true trial and error, but when you are running after a 9 year old and a 5 year old there isn’t a lot of time to think about settings. So you play, and you shoot, and you play, and adjust and shoot some more.

Mind you, while I would have preferred to have a Lastolite Ezybox in here… you simply can’t- the environment went allow for it… and neither will the kids :) .

Enjoy the images from the day!