Photo of the Day


Firing Away

April 27, 2017

By Libby Peterson

© Amber French

“It was a rainy spring day on the beach at the Olympic National Forest in Washington when our friend Kevin proposed to his love, Whitney, the night before this photo was taken,” says Amber French, who runs her Seattle studio with her husband, Michael Sessa. She and Michael came up with the romantic idea to light fireworks after Kevin proposed, but they had the misfortune of having forest rangers standing right behind them.

“After watching Kevin and Whitney get interrogated in a parking lot in the pouring rain until well after the sun went down, I started thinking to myself, I think Kevin might kill me,” French recalls. “Fortunately for me, Kevin had a sense of humor and did not kill me.”

They called it a night and decided to shoot engagement portraits the next morning. It was Kevin who actually thought of the concept for this image just as the photographers were setting up their lights in a “quaint little cabin” in the Hoh Rainforest. “Kevin loves experimenting with the craft of painting with light,” French says. “I’ve always loved the gritty, dark portraits that he creates. I was so excited to take a stab at it, with him as the subject, having a more romantic spin on it.”

It was all done in camera, in one shot. “By leaving our aperture wide open for four seconds and popping off three flashes of light from our strobe, this image is shot all in a single frame,” French explains. “The only time we used Photoshop is to adjust the white balance, and some other minor adjustments.” They spent the rest of the day roaming the Hoh Rainforest and shooting more portraits—and respecting fire safety, of course.

(Shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens at f/13, 4 seconds of exposure and ISO 100.)

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