Playing with Light

Hand Filtered Magnolias

Have you ever held a flashlight up to your hand to see it glow bright red?  I'm guessing you have, and if you haven't you should. It's very cool. You can see your bones and sometimes your blood vessels too. But most importantly, your had glows like the end of E.T.'s healing finger. What does this have to do with photography or trees? Well, it turns out that your hand can become a flash filter using the same action. I found this out on complete accident while just playing around with my camera at dusk.

Wait... are those blossoms... Glowing?!?

Now that the weather is milder, I am putting more focus on trying to figure out the settings on my digital SLR and what the different programs will allow me to do. My beloved Magnolia tree has finally started blooming and I wanted to try to capture the white and pink blossoms in the blueish light of dusk. While I was fiddling around with settings I decided to see what difference the flash would make, with varying success. Naturally in the dark ambient light, the areas of the tree that were close to me were washed out but the middle ground was quite nice. In an attempt to diffuse some of the light I put my hand about 3 inches in front of the flash. To my surprise, some of the blossoms seemed to be glowing in the shot I took.

Regular flash, no filter

It took a couple of tries, but I eventually found that the closer I put my hand to the flash, the more intense the 'glowing' of the pink blossoms became. I tried a variety of shots and decided to try to focus on one blossom that was fully open. I wanted to compare a regular flash shot with a hand-filtered one, and I couldn't have asked for a better result. 

Same bloom using my hand as a filter.

The blurring of the edges of the bloom are due to the slight breeze that started up, combined with the low shutter-speed. The filter effect also results in softer edges of the image and the intensity of the pink tint depends on the distance from the subject as well as the distance between your hand and the flash.  I am ecstatic about the accidental awesomeness that I stumbled upon and I will be experimenting with this technique more in the future. Hopefully my images will become more interesting and unique as my knowledge grows.

Same blossom as above.  Camera was further from flower and
 hand was further from flash bulb, resulting in lighter color
and soft quality.