I thought I would include a description of how I did this, as it is quite fun and easy to do, and get consistent results. I used 3 Nikon speedlights to accomplish this. One behind my son with a blue gel to give him a bit of an outline (I wish it had come out all the way around his hood, but couldn’t quite get it before his patience ran out). One rubber-banded to his right arm behind the crystal ball, and one in a softbox at 10 o’clock.
I got the light trails by taking a 3-second exposure of him standing in front of a 26-floor apartment block at night. I started the exposure zoomed in to 50mm on my 17-50mm lens, pressed the shutter and slowly zoomed out to 17mm to create the light zoom trails from the window lights. At the end of the zoom, I manually set off the flashes to light him.
Thank you all for your comments. Inspired now to try one while zooming and rotating the camera :)
@citymars, yep, those two 1 votes really killed me, but I really hope the low votes were not for the reasons you suggest. That would be a sad day for photography, creativity and DPC.
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Place: 3 out of 82 Avg (all users): 6.8511 Avg (commenters): 8.0000 Avg (participants): 7.1282 Avg (non-participants): 6.7451 Views since voting: 4984 Views during voting: 396 Votes: 141 Comments: 40 Favorites: 11 (view)
I'm so glad this did well. (No telling for certain, but I'm guessing the odd low votes are from people who object to crystal balls or other magical symbols, especially when combined with the word "Divine" in the title.)
And thanks for your detailed explanation of your technique.
Thanks all for your comments and encouragement. My son loves the photo and has been waiting for the challenge to finish so that he can use it for his Facebook profile pic :)
Amazing image. You and your son have a lot of patience, glad it paid off. He has a great expression on his face, it fits the mood exactly. Congrats on your HM.
Very effective technique - pop a flash and zoom? The title is credible as a movie and your image matches it very well. Simple, direct, relevant composition and great technicals conspire to make this a very effective piece of work.
Divine Prophet Child
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