As you probably already know I’m new to the world of SLR photography.  I have been shooting in manual to force myself to learn and have recently gotten excited on about long exposure stuff.  I was a total dork the other night and drove around holding the camera taking long exposure shots of passing cars just to see how it would turn out.  Some were cool, most looked like crap.  I also tried taking some long exposure shots on Mt. Helix at night.  Problem is it was a little hazy, my tripod sucks and I only have a 50mm lens…

Then I was inspired by a photo I saw on Flickr and messed with a couple long exposure shots triggering a flash in convient places.  Yes I could have done this with remote flashes on wireless systems and it would have come out cleaner but hey, all I have is a crappy speed light that takes 8 seconds to re charge, has one setting (full power), no wireless triggers and the thing doesn’t even have a shoe that would fit my camera even if I wanted to mount it on top.  We played with holding a reflector umbrella (silver lined) and set the exposure to 20 seconds.  We set off two flashes.  One camera left at about 20′ away and one directly behind the subject up into the umbrella.  They came out pretty cool  I’ll upload some of the mess ups as well so you can see what was going on.