I Saw a Photo and Had to Go Try It

I've wanted to get into making content for a while now — YouTube, vlogs, whatever you want to call it. I keep circling it without actually starting. This is me starting.

On the morning of August 14th I came across a post from a photographer on Instagram, @jeickho. A tree lit up with flash, shot right around golden hour, with the sky still blue behind it and the clouds going orange and pink. Reddish bark, green leaves, the whole thing popping off the background. He's got more like it — something simple from nature in the foreground, flash on it, and a darker, sharper sky behind. I reposted it and then couldn't stop thinking about it.

It's not far off from things I've already done, which is probably why it grabbed me. But I hadn't gone at it deliberately. So that evening I grabbed my Fuji X-H1, my flash, and the rest of my gear and drove down to the waterfront in Vancouver.

That spot goes back a while for me. I used to work in a warehouse just up the street, and on breaks I'd walk down to the old dock with the white railing, sit on the concrete, and look out at the water. That water is the Columbia. It's been in the background of a lot of my photos over the years without ever really being the subject, and I knew I wanted it behind most of what I shot that night.

I got there early to test the water — literally walked around first, found a few spots I wanted to work, and got everything set up. I also brought my Insta360 with me to try recording a short photo vlog while I was shooting, which turned out to be far more embarrassing than I expected. I mostly ended up with b-roll of what I was doing and where I was.

The first real problem was shutter speed. Too slow and it wouldn't line up with the flash, and I'd get half a properly exposed frame and half a black one. Then there was working out what to change depending on whether I was facing into the sun or away from it, which took longer than I'd like to admit. Eventually I got it dialed.

Once it was working, I went looking for greenery — leaves, branches, anything I could light in the foreground to get a hard separation from the sky behind it. Blue, orange, pink, cotton candy, whatever you want to call what was happening back there.

I walked down the pier past McMenamins and the Oswego Grill, didn't find much, and turned around to head west toward the I-5 bridge. Going past the condos that sit in front of the white railing where the old boat dock is, I came across a couple of lifts — big orange machinery, completely out of place against everything else around them. I realized straight away they could be the subject.

I spent a good while on those two. Working out how to use the flash to make the orange pop against the blue, and how to isolate the carrier part of the lift against the sky. They came out better than I expected, and they're some of my favorite frames I've taken.

My favorite of the whole night, though, is the bush — long stems with small green leaves coming off them, and the way the flash caught the tips and edges gave them this glow that half obscures them. Against the blue and pink behind it, it just worked. The whites are almost blown out, and it doesn't hurt the picture at all — it gives it character. If you look closely you can see stars back there too.

That was pretty much the night. It's the first thing in a while where I tried something genuinely new and walked away feeling like I'd gotten somewhere, and it's a technique I'm going to keep working at. There's a video coming from this one as well — I'll link it here once it's edited.