Strobeless Jump, originally uploaded by vsacker.

One of my Christmas presents this past year was a Strobist lighting kit from MPEX photo (kits here). I hadn’t really played with it until this past weekend, but the wet and cold weather foiled my plans to go out and shoot and left me inside to mess around.

After spending a little time learning about guide numbers and proper manual flash exposure, I starting doing some tests. Headshots get boring rather quick, and I’m not the most attractive guy to look at anyway, so I started messing with the timer on my camera and stopping motion with the strobe.

I gave myself a long shutter and relied completely on the strobe to stop my movement. Well, I waited a little too long between shots this time and the flash went to sleep on me (need to change the default sleep time to greater than 90s). The result was this motion blur of me jumping in the little (non-color corrected) ambient light available.  Maybe it’s a little odd that one of my favorite images from a test of a new lighting kit was the one shot where it didn’t fire, but least you don’t have to look at the expression on my face in this frozen leap.