A backup sun

Wouldn’t it be great if you could control the sun? You could rub your hands together like Montgomery Burns and then decide whether to have a sunny day, cloudy day, or a big storm. You know, just like Storm in the X-Men.

But… you can’t. Too bad, because this ability would come in extra handy for photographers. Like a couple weeks ago when I was in Chicago. Walking through Millennium Park, we came through this lovely alley of trees.

Not bad. But I found myself wishing that some sunlight would come streaming through the trees. Not a lot of it, just a beam of sunlight to light up one of those trees.

No sun in sight, though. It was alternately raining and drizzling. Definitely no hope of the sun coming out any time soon.

Even though I wanted to travel light, and had brought just one camera and two lenses on my trip, I had known myself well enough to also bring a flash. I didn’t want to bother with my flash triggers – that would have taken up too much room. This was what swayed me to bring my Canon 7D instead of the 5D Mark II – because the 7D has a pop-up flash that you can use to wirelessly trigger a remote flash. It’s infrared rather than radio, but I could work with that.

Traveling with my husband, Matt, meant I’d also brought a handy VOLS (voice-operated light stand). So my next photo looked like this:

On our second day in Chicago, I woke up at the crack of dawn (really – it was 5:30am), leapt out of bed and within 10 minutes was walking through the city, looking for some pretty morning light. There wasn’t much to be found. I did eventually find some blue-ish sky over by the Navy Pier. I liked this composition of the chess table in the foreground of the beach.

Silhouettes are great, but that look wasn’t doing it for me here. I needed some light on the table. No sunlight here, so my speedlight came out again. You can be sure that at around 6:30am when this photo was taken, my VOLS was back at our hotel, sound asleep. No matter; there was a large recycling bin just behind the table, so I put my flash on there.

Lest I give the wrong idea – here’s what Chicago looked like a few hours after those first photos were taken.

It was plenty sunny. Just not when I wanted it to be. No matter.

*Disclaimer* of course speedlights can’t completely recreate the sun, and there are plenty of limitations to using them. But there are far, far more possibilities than you’d have without them.