Desperate...

On our last evening at Bosque, the hoped for sunset colors at Ed Kranepool never materialized. It turned out to be one big gray dark dud. But more cranes flew into the pond in the near darkness than I had seen on the whole trip. So I got my flash and started playing.

As Denise likes to say, creating good blurs at extremely slow shutter speeds is like playing the lottery. And that goes double when you are trying for a good flash blur :)

Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS II with the 1.4X II TC (hand held at 280mm) with the EOS-1D MIV. Manual flash at 1:1. ISO 250" 1/4 sec. at f/4 set manually was about +2 stops. I finally remembered to set rear curtain synch so the ambient blur is behind the flashed exposure where you want it.

I did some fancy stepping in Photoshop to darken the flashed heads of the two cranes.

I'm fairly new to this forum, and, this style of photography. I do know that shooting pairs in any style is a challenge, at least for me. All that said, I love the image. There is good detail in the birds and real sense
of flight. I think the diagonal formed by the wings is very cool. The heads look great to me.............wish it were mine. :)

Artie, Beautiful flash blur. Nice looking wings and it looks like shadows on a wall.:)

Hi Artie, nice job with the second curtain sync. I like these, big fun! You got a very nice separation from the main subjects and the dark blur. Nice recovery on the heads. :cool:

Wow. That is very cool. I can see how this would be a lottery. There are so many things you have to get right. Just to get the awesome photo of the two birds timed right as Jay mentioned, is hard enough. But then adding the flash at 2nd curtain with the right power and getting the timing right on shutterspeed ... too much to even contemplate. Great job! And thanks for all the details on how you did it.

I agree with Denise about the "shadow on the wall". It reminds me of adding a drop shadow with Layer Styles.:p.

Thanks all. Just for the record book, here is the original. There was lots of work to be done :)

Very nice flash blur and processing on this one Arthur. Love the shadow effect of the ambient blur too.