When you think portraits; do you think daytime with beautiful diffused light, bokeh and thing framing? Well this portrait has none of those.

This portrait of Nick, a good friend since high school, was taken at almost midnight and it presented a lot of challenges. I like challenges and some of my best works have come from overcoming photographic challenges. We wanted the Miami skyline, Nick and his ride to be sharp. This would require both the foreground and background to be lighted separately.

In order to get a sharp and noise free image, I would need to use a tripod and a low ISO. Now here is the BUT, how do I make Nick not be a complete shadow compared to the background and a proper exposure would require at least a 30 second exposure. This would introduce motion blur.

This was my light bulb moment, use a flash. Okay but they were still challenges to overcome. I wanted to avoid on camera flash, I didn’t want to blast Nick like a deer in headlights and after the flash he would need to keep still for the 30 seconds of the exposure.

Now all my solutions to the challenges would come together. I could fire the flash wirelessly off camera and away from Nick and I could fire the flash just as the 30 seconds were over to freeze Nick and expose him separately from the background.

I thought all of my challenges were overcome but there was still the white balance, color temperature, issue. The background was sodium vapor and the foreground flash, something would have weird colors on it. Luckily with RAW files, the white balance can be changed without any ill effects and I was able to combine both images to get a proper white balance.

The final result was a beautiful portrait that I could present to Nick.