Since posting a series of fly-fishing images from my recent trip to Scotland, the above image in particular has received a lot of attention. When Sarah first saw it she said 'wow, it looks like you're fishing through a fairytale!' I liked that description because it's exactly how I felt as I followed the stream up into the Ochil hills.
The main question I keep getting asked is whether or not the image is a 'fake'. The answer, of course, is 'no'.
Well... not exactly.
I'll explain what I mean and how the shot came together after the jump.
I grew up at the foot of the Ochil hills in a village called Tillicoultry. As a boy, my mates and I must have explored every inch of every glen from Blairlogie in the west to Rumbling Bridge in the east. In the summer we would camp in the hills and swim in the burns. On very rare occasions, and normally when the burns were in spate, I even managed to catch trout or two.
Location, location
A photograph can never reproduce the sound of water, the smell of wild garlic or the humidity of a Scottish glen in spring, but the image above gives a fair indication of what the scene looked like and some of the challenges that were overcome in producing the final image.
Note, for example, the dynamic range of the scene - I'm barely capturing any shadow detail on the rockface but the highlights are completely blown, especially in the upper right corner of the frame.
While you're there, note how soft the corners are. This is because I am using a Nikkor 12-24 AFS DX lens - a lens that is designed to be used on a camera with a smaller image sensor like the Nikon D7000. Fine, but I have it mounted to my Nikon D700, which has a full-frame sensor. I'm trying to go wide... really wide. And my next widest lens was a 24mm f/2.8 prime. With this lens zoomed out to 12mm on the D700, you get a circular image. By 18mm the vignetting is gone but the sharpness and resolution are still shameful in the corners. Here, I am shooting at 19mm. Fortunately, the crappy corners worked to my advantage in the final image.
A few more notes about the scene: The logs in the foreground help to convey the sense of seclusion that I felt while hiking up through the glen. However, the big rock in the foreground lit up like a beacon when the flashes hit it. This was properly distracting and, as it was too heavy to lift, the rock had to come out in post.Finally, look at the texture of that rock face. Talk about depth and three-dimensionality, eh? This had to be factored into the decision about to where to place my flashes. I wanted to make sure the light was hitting the rockface at a bit of an angle in order to retain a sense of depth. Using on-axis light would have flattened everything out and lessened some of the impact of the scene.
Let there be...
The addition of light is the major creative element of this photograph. As you look again at the final image, check out my hat. From there, it's pretty easy to tell where the light is coming from. I used two speedlights, both Nikon SB80DXs, both triggered with Elinchrom Skyports. The flash coming from camera left (the one hitting my back) is bare, and the light coming from right and high up is firing through a small, white shoot-thru umbrella. This is placed very close to the corner of the frame and is causing a bit of lens flare. Luckily, when combined with the already soft corners, this adds to the ethereal dreamlike quality of the scene.
Once everything was set up, it was simply a case of walking into the scene and firing the camera using a remote trigger and a 10 second shutter delay. I took a handful of frames before capturing an image that I was happy with. Having done this I stepped out of the scene again, stopped the camera down from f/4 to f/22, and opened up the shutter to blur the water entering the pool. This was then pasted in in post. The final image therefore has elements of frozen motion and motion blur.
I'm really taken by the creative possibilities that flash offers fly-fishing photography. I'm only really scratched the surface and this is surely something I will come back to again and again.And to return to the question of whether the photo is a fake or not, the final image is - I would suggest - enriched by the use of creative tools. Indeed, you could argue that by playing with light, colour and motion to reveal elements of the scene that cannot be perceived (such as the frozen fly-line, the motion-blurred water and certain textures in the rocks and logs) the image is in some ways more real than it appears to the naked eye.
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