Pixel Darkroom Photography

Today I wanted to shoot this little bird feeder in sunset light. But since the sun is always gone behind a building by the time it’s about to light this bird feeder, I thought I’d create my own sunset light. The way it works is like this: You set your camera to shoot on manual mode and underexpose the photograph so you can get a rich saturated sky. You do this by closing down the aperture (higher f-stop number) and/or increasing the shutter speed. I shot this somewhere around 1/160 of a second so it could still synchronize with my off camera flash via a radio trigger, called pocket wizard and at f8, or so. The flash had a gel (a colored plastic film on top, to make it orange looking, closer to the color of the setting sun). You have to play a little with the settings until you get the desired balance of light. There it is, day 144, bird feeder in the late afternoon home made sunset light. Read below for settings and check out the setup shot linked below for actual “view”.

bird feeder in the afternoon sun

Strobist info: 580 EX II at 1/1 105mm with full CTO via Pocket wizard, CR. Drop down the ambient to bring some color back in the sky. Setup shot.