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A few pics from the Southbank precinct with Brett on Monday night...

Very nice shots BR. I particularly like the pagoda.

Might I suggest cloning out the lights from the buildings around the pagoda. I reckon it would give a more intimate feel to the shot.

Shane,

can you please revisit the site for #3, and reshoot this image in portrait mode? That way you can include the top of the pagoda in the back, as well as the bottom of the monument in the foreground, and you should still be able to keep the secondary pagoda on the lh side in the image as well.

Exposure and wb on this one is tricky, and the colour of the foreground monument suggests a different lighting type than what is predominantly illuminating the rest of the objects. My first thoughts were that it's off-camera flash, but it's also lit from ground level, and while mostly from camera left, it's broad enough that the rh side is also well illuminated too.

Can you please explain how this was lit, so that I can better understand the challenges you were facing here?

for the Pagoda shot the monument is concrete and its colour was completely different than the wood.

when i tried available light all i got was a dark blur from the monument so i used the flash handheld and held at ground level with a guess of the distance needed for a full flash test shot so i could still get the long exposure needed on the Pagoda.

it wasn't until i got home that i realised my one "playing around shot" actually worked.

the whole area is surrounded with no room to move back so it was quite hard to get the whole thing in as it is quite tall.

i havent had a chance to look at all the pics yet and tried a few other different things that night and will post some up when i do.

Big Red wrote:so i used the flash handheld and held at ground level

My gut feel wasn't too far off, then.

While I accept what you're saying about the different colorations of the various objects, the wb of your flash wasn't being too helpful here either, as it's going to give you a somewhat higher colour temperatue for things that it's illuminating, whereas the other other stuff is being lit by photofloods or similar, with a lower colour temperature, and thus they'll appear warmer.

Difficult situation to get around, but a correcting gel on the flash may have been of some use in that regard.

with a guess of the distance needed for a full flash test shot so i could still get the long exposure needed on the Pagoda.

Ok .... think about this for a technique.

Start by metering for the main scene .... and take those values. Let's say 1/4 @ f/5.6, ISO 200. The actual numbers don't matter too much - I'm simply trying to explain a concept.

When you're metering, try to use spot, and try to get a value from a place that's neither too bright, nor too dark, in the area in question. This will give you a mid-range, baseline starting point.

Use those values as the basis for your exposure. It will be likely, from what you're describing, that the foreground object will be dark at that metered exposure.

That's to be expected, and this is where you bring your flash into play. Set the flash onto it's A mode (not a TTL A, but just a traditional, simple old aperture setting mode. Set the power (aperture) value to f/5.6 or f/6.3, which is the same aperture that you're metering and setting your exposure for.

Now make your exposure, and chimp your histogram, understanding that it's an expected outcome for this subject that it should be doing a Julia - tending (probably somewhat heavily) towards the left.

the whole area is surrounded with no room to move back so it was quite hard to get the whole thing in as it is quite tall

You should still be able to rotate the camera into a portrait mode, which will give you a greater vertical area in your frame, even shooting from the same position.

My flash will do trailing curtain but i couldn't figure out how to do it without wasting half an hour reading the manual so i just took a guess with it manually triggered
I think from memory it was 30seconds at F8

I figured since i couldn't blend in the foreground interest due to vastly different colours and lighting i may as well make a feature of it.

i did take a lot of pics around the Pagoda and will see if there are any better ones when i get home

another view of the pagoda ...