Trying something new

In the Urban Jungle 

Tokina 12-24mm Pro DX, ISO400, 1/60s, F5.6 @ 12mm

Today I went for a walk with a family member and we focused on photographing graffiti. Now photographing graffiti is completely new to me, so it was interesting to work with. The part of Greater Vancouver that I live in is kept clean of graffiti, for the most part, so finding anything interesting can be a challenge. I knew a few good spots from when I lived in a low cost apartment complex a few years ago, so we headed out to a local park and looked under road bridges. The first bridge we looked under had a lot of tag graffiti, but nothing overly interesting. We hit the jackpot on the second bridge we looked at.


Under the bridges using a flash was a must, because the light levels would have required me to use extremely high ISOs, I was only able to get 1/15s at ISO1600 without using a flash. Due to the nature of the area under the bridges, which pass over a small river, using a tripod was not practical, so I popped up my built in flash for commander mode, and held my SB-800 in my other hand, for some of the shots. In the shot in the post, I used the SB-800 on camera, and bounced at an angel with the built in bounce card popped out to direct the majority of the light at the cement walls.

I came home with 88 photos total, which I considered a decent amount. Overall it was a nice outing and I learned a few things, like remembering to make sure your off camera flash is on the right channel. That would explain why it didn't work and also explains why I was not liking some of my photos were not lit the way I thought they would be. For the life of me, I cannot remember why I changed the channel on the flash, and I can only surmise that I changed it by mistake. Lesson learned the hard way, just something else I have to remember to check next time I shoot using commander mode and an off camera flash.