Week 5 hit while we were on vacation in Hawaii.  The theme for this week was “Lights”.  One of the fun parts about this weekly photo shoot is that it’s all about interpretation – I’m allowed to do anything I like that say’s “Lights” to me.  (My game my rules :-).

When I travel I do tend to take quite a lot of gear with me but I don’t normally take any lights.  This time however I had a single speedlight with an umbrella.  While talking to Abi one afternoon we thought it would be fun to take a picture of her flicking her wet hair back.  I figured to do this I’d need a light to freeze the motion and get that perfect picture.  So just after the sun set we walked down to the hotel pools to see if there were any empty ones that would allow us to make a picture.

Unbelievably the infinity pool was empty so we ran to that and Abi jumped in.

I put the Umbrella and speedlight on the end of a mono pod and asked Lisa to hold the light pointing at Abi.

Before Abi started to flick the hair I needed to get the lighting right, so we took 5 pictures getting the right exposure and light power.  Once done, she started to “perform”.  Amazingly it took less than 10 attempts to get this shot.  So from start to finish it was 14 photographs.

I have to say I knew what we were trying to do but didn’t think the image would come out like this, both Abi and I were delighted and celebrated the shot by swimming in the pool together for the next half hour.

Hope you like the shot too.