Lymm Dam
Neil Alexander's Best of 2009 - September - Faked Sunrise over The Wishing Bridge by Lymm Dam
Took this shot at the weekend whilst out recce-ing for a commission I have to do. I'd never been to Lymm dam before though I've passed it often enough. Tooled up with just my 70-200mm F2.8 & Sigma 10-20mm, and a couple of SB-900s, I went for a little pre-dawn stroll around the edge of the lake to scope out possible locations for an autumnal panorama. The weather was typically grey and gloomy and the sun was never gonna appear. The sandstone bedrock and the bountiful vegetation would have made for some wonderful detailed shots, had I been looking for the type of shot, but I wasn't. So I sauntered on, enjoying the solace until I stumbled upon the "Wishing Bridge". I plotted up for a brew and figured I'd have a little play here. I set up one SB-900 on a gorilla pod, and suspended it from a branch high up camera right, and then popped the other one on the tripod as close to the first as I could with a tree acting as a gobo between them and the bridge. Whacked Pocket Wizards on them both, gelled them and set one to full power and the other to half, and zoomed them both to 200mm. I then shot the bridge with the 10-20mm at 11mm, 1/15 sec at F6.3 on ISO800. It was just an experiment to see whether I could replicate a sun low on the horizon, and I think it's a fairly reasonable effort, though I maybe overdid the light a little. The shot below is the same location, but without any light.
