Favorite Travel Quotes

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."
-- Mark Twain
Innocents Abroad

"Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey." -- Fitzhugh Mullan

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving." -- Lao Tzu

Nikon’s Slow Sync Helps Blend Natural and Articifial Light

©Bert Gildart: One of the photo techniques I have used on this trip more than on any other is Nikon’s Slow Sync camera setting. One example from this four-month-long excursion with our Airstream is of the food setting taken at Frogmore, an interpretive center in Louisiana located not far from Natchez, Mississippi. We’ve spent time here trying to gather new images, which we’ll use to one day to update our book on the incomparable Natchez Trace National Parkway.

Nikon’s default setting is for shutter speeds between 1/60th of a second and 1/250th of a second. That’s fine in many situations, but not when light levels are low as in this small cabin set up to interpret quarters used by slaves in the antebellum years of the Old South.

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Nikon's Slow Sync helps to blend natural light with artificial light, Frogmore Interpretive Center, Louisiana

Conditions were rough then and replicas of the food and the cabin’s interior project that. Everything about this setting suggested austerity, and I wanted to preserve that feeling, but believe the photo would have lost much if detail in the shadows had been muted.

Light from the windows illuminated one side of the elements in the photo while my single strobe lifted details in the shadow. I could have used Nikon’s high-sync default strobe setting, but that would have overpowered the natural light and created a more contrast-y picture. That could have been remedied by using more strobes, but how much more simple to combine natural light and a single strobe light.

I like this rendition, shot with a wide angle lens at 1/8th of a second and an aperture of f-8 using, of course, Nikon’s Slow Sync setting. It probably goes without saying, but, of course, I used a tripod.

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THIS TIME TWO YEARS AGO:

*Arrowleaf Balsam Root

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