TimeLine Media Blog

On yesterday’s post, I wrote about creating vignettes, in Photoshop. Today, I want to post some photos of another cool way to create vignettes, but this time, doing it in camera. I made these at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC. In this walk-through park dedicated to the longest-serving US President, there are many of his quotes engraved into the large pink-colored blocks that make up the monument. You can use the color of the blocks to your advantage as pink and blue are next to each other on the color wheel, so they will work together well in a frame. Here is a frame of the manual exposure setup in the camera without the flash:

Washington, DC

I am just looking to keep a dark, saturated blue in the sky. The flash will be used to illuminate the foreground and pop the subject out of the frame. To setup the flash, I put a warming gel over the front of the flash. Additionally I zoomed the head in to 180mm. This focuses the flash into a tight circle as opposed to just spilling light all over the scene. This is what creates the vignette effect which will draw your viewer’s eye to where you want it to go. I hand held the flash with my left hand, and made this photo:

How far you zoom the head, can make the circle of light larger. Especially if you have more of an area you want to cover in light. This next photo, I zoomed the head out farther since I was standing farther away, and had more words that I wanted to light:

It was a challenge to get the light exactly right. Sometimes, I would flash the ground, sometimes, I would only light the trees above the blocks. It would be much easier to do this with the flash on a stand that you can control with more consistency, but I did not want to risk any entanglements with the park rangers. I simply used a hot shoe cable cord to get the flash off the camera, and fired away. Give it a try next time to get a different look at places that are photographed all the time!

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