Baby Blue Eyes

Baby Blue, originally uploaded by Gamut's Edge.

I took this one of Ella out on our back deck. She gets crabby between 4:00 and bedtime. The only way to keep her happy at that time of day is to do something outside. We took her toys and a blanket onto the back deck.

I used my best lighting skills to make this portrait. I metered the scene for ambient light and set up my camera in manual mode for one stop underexposed to the ambient light. I then set my spare strobe with umbrella reflector high and right (right side of frame) and maybe a little behind Ella. There is a solid fence just outside the left side of the frame. I bounced the camera mounted strobe off that fence. I had set a 2:1 ration between the umbrella flash and the camera mounted flash. You can see the umbrella lit side is slightly brighter.

If you want to learn how to do this sort of thing you should read strobist.