One of the most popular subjects that we parents shoot is our kids. It is easy to excuse boring kid pictures as being a product of being in boring places when we take them. We can get great shots on vacation, right? In reality, there are lots of ways to jazz-up an otherwise stale image that we take in our homes. Often a little imagination can go a long way and that is what I did here. Wintertime and foul weather tend to keep kids indoors and that is why my daughter was coloring this morning. I grabbed my 20D and my 24-70mm 2.8L to take some pictures while she concentrated on her work. I put my 580EX flash on the hot shoe set to "master" (with output off) and a 420EX flash set to "slave" on a little plastic stand on the table in front of her and at a 45deg. angle from me and the camera. I took a few shots and they looked ok. Definitely better than with the on-camera flash lighting the scene but not spectacular. I then remembered a technique from my "mentor" Neil Turner. Neil publishes terrific how-to's on his website www.dg28.com and I have been itching to try this "blur with flash" technique. I set the exposure manually on the camera to 1/10 sec and f4.5 and utilized the ETTL flash to determine flash output. 1/10 sec gave me enough time to make an arc movement during the exposure and create the motion blur you see in this example. The beauty of this is that our cluttered family room doesn't even really appear in the images! Though not a vacation beach portrait, the photograph has a unique appeal that a "straight" shot would not have.
