Hi, everyone!

It's Finnegan again!

I just got back from a photo adventure at the "haunted" Bostian bridge in Statesville, North Carolina. I didn't see any ghosts, but a big scary train came through and boy did my big ears hear all that noise! I went to the bridge with two of my favorite people, Hannah Selector (she's getting ready for a Horror Convention in Charlotte), and my dad, Mark, and we worked some photography magic.

Hannah wanted to create some spooky night-time photos without the trouble of actually shooting at night. You can see that it was only the afternoon in the photos of me posing on the tracks, and reviewing my notes for the shoot. (You'd pant too in that summer heat!) My dad knew just how to achieve a midnight look in Hannah's photos. And I learned that you can make it look like night, even during the day, by using a flash and lowering the exposure of the shot.

You start by using the in-camera exposure meter to set the correct camera exposure. Dad wanted to shoot at a shutter speed of 1/200s. At that speed, the camera said the aperture should be set to F4 for a correct exposure. To make it dark, he reduced the aperture by 3 stops (larger number, smaller opening) to F12 so that the picture would be underexposed and dark.

Then he added a flash. Dad uses an app on his phone to calculate what flash power to use (something about flash power vs. distance). He took a couple of test shots and adjusted the flash power until he got the effect that he and Hannah wanted. Then Hannah did lots of neat and silly poses until they got the perfect shot. And we took a picture together for my scrapbook. I love her a lot.

So keep your flash handy, and you can turn daytime into nighttime in your photos too!

9/10/2019