Perhaps I should file this under “What to do with a familiar subject you have shot hundreds of times.” I’ve shot single leaves on various backgrounds over the years, so when I spotted this solitary maple leaf, my initial enthusiasm quickly faded when I realized it was another variation of the same theme I had shot many, many times before. How to make this one different — if even just slightly different from all the others?
I recalled seeing images from years back, created by mixing the ambient outdoor light with the light from a flashlight (what my friends in the UK would call a “torch”). The ambient light was left to illuminate the background, while the main subject was illuminated with the flashlight.
Now, a handheld flashlight is not overly bright, so I returned at dusk (when the overall ambient light level would not overpower the light from the flashlight), set up my camera on a tripod, and framed the image. To meter this exposure, I first metered the image without any light from the flashlight and found that in the failing light of dusk, an exposure of 6 seconds at f/16 was required.
Thinking about how the final image should look, I decided to under-expose the ambient by about one stop to create a bit of drama, settling on an exposure of 3 seconds at an aperture of f/16. Next, I zoomed the camera lens until I framed just the central part of the image, turned on the flashlight, and hand-holding it, adjusted the distance from the subject until the exposure indicated 3 secs. @ f/16. Remember the Inverse-Square law in lighting? The intensity of any light source diminishes as you move the light source farther away. Doubling the distance reduces the intensity of the light to one-fourth. So, the easiest way to balance the exposure of the flashlight with the ambient light is to simply adjust its distance from the subject. The result will be that the flashlight correctly exposes the central part of the frame, while the ambient illumination in the rest of the frame will be underexposed, creating that drama I was looking for.
There is one more thing to consider here.
The blue light of the overhead sky provides the ambient light and is, therefore, very bluish. This bluish colour balance, along with the one-stop underexposure, is responsible for the overall deep blue cast away from the centre of the frame. On the other hand, the flashlight’s light will be much warmer depending on the bulb type. The LED flashlight used here created a colour balance reasonably close to a daylight colour balance, and with that in mind I set a daylight colour balance in my camera.
With all of this set, which, by the way, took less time to set up than it likely took you to read this far, I reframed the image, grabbed the flashlight and, holding it at roughly the distance established earlier, tripped the shutter for the 3-second exposure. During the exposure, I kept the light of the flashlight trained on the central part of the frame, continuously moving it in a gentle circular motion to ensure a soft transition from the light of the flashlight to the rest of the frame.
Now, as not to give you the idea that all the variables in this setup were determined ahead by precise metering and calculation, several tries were needed to get the image you see here… quite a few, actually. But that’s just part of the game. Take your best guess, be flexible and be willing to experiment. You might just might be surprised.
