Skater Girl

I had some major blip candidates today but this end-of-the-evening blip won out. I really like it. It's a shot of Holly watching the skaters on the ice rink in Lloyd Center mall.

We ended up spending a good deal of time at this mall. It's not a mall we normally go to but we were dropping Kim off nearby to meet up with friends for Santacon. I have a blip from last year's Santacon from downtown Portland. I also took some photos of Kim in her outfit. we had a lot of fun doing that shoot. :)

After we dropped her off we went to the Lloyd Center mall and wandered about try to do Christmas shopping, then getting something to eat and then wandering about again. The girls did buy some gifts...but only for themselves (with their own money). We need to go shopping again but plan on buy other people gifts! Still, we had a great time just hanging out with each other and that's what's important.

Later in the evening we picked up Kim. She was dead beat but had a good time reveling with the other santas. She's getting over a head cold and probably shouldn't have been out and about. We'll see how she is tomorrow.

[tech stuff]
So this blip of Holly watching the skaters is also an interesting one from a technical point of view. It's a good example, I think, of using bounce flash with a color correcting gel to capture a moment. So we were down by the rink watching the "Zamboni", the ice resurfacing machine, do it's think. I had my camera out to take some pictures. You'll notice the low ceiling at the end of the rink where we were standing. I though it would be perfect for bouncing some flash on to the girls. I did a test shot to see. It worked great but the color of the flash light does not match the ambient at all. It might not look too bad in the test shot but when you correct the white balance for the mall it's not so good. (However, it's does a good job of showing you exactly how the flash is lighting the scene.) I put a 1-stop orange gel over the flash to warm it up a lot. When it's white balance is corrected the image looks natural and it's hard to tell a flash has been used. With this set up I was able to get the final shot of Holly watching the skaters as they came on to the rink after the machine had finished resurfacing the ice.
[/tech stuff]