Flash Play

After my run Wednesday at Two Rivers Park I headed over to Pinnacle Mountain to see if there was anything worth shooting. I stopped at the arboretum off Pinnacle Mountain Road thinking I might get a shot of some cypress knees down by the Little Maumelle River. I did something to my knee during my run and I was limping pretty heavily. (I later made the self diagnosis of ilotibial band syndrome.) I barely made it to the river and to add insult to injury I couldn’t find anything swampy that I wanted to shoot.

On my limp back up he trail I came across this dead armadillo and decided to try my hand at a little Strobist style off-camera flash. I underexposed the ambient light and let the flash provide the correct exposure on the carcass. It didn’t turn out quite as I had envisioned. I envisioned a well-lit corpse with a goodly expanse of dark forest in the background. But hand-holding the flash while trying to get low on a badly hurting knee while enduring the stink of a dead armadillo is harder than it sounds. I gave up after two frames and this is what I got.

I headed back up the trail trying the technique on various plants and signs. I don’t think these are very good shots, but they’re the best of the many I tried for.

I spend a lot of time in the park because it has one of Abby’s favorite playgrounds, but I haven’t really found a good place to shoot the mountain itself. As I was leaving the arboretum at dusk I looked back to the left and saw the mountain looming and the road curving in front and got the idea to try for some car-light trails. Again, this isn’t much of a shot, but I did get some light trials. I think this would be much better at dawn because the rising sun should light the mountain while the road stays quite a bit more in the dark. I don’t know if I can get up that early, though.