Flash in nature photography

After a hard day at work today I needed a hour's 'photo-therapy'. The light was pretty poor so I put a flashgun in my bag, although I had no idea what I was going to use it for.

I ended up at a good damsel ?roost and started to shoot. The light levels were difficult and the wind, worse, so I reached for the flash and experimented. Hope you like the result?

1Ds 3
180 mm + 12 mm + 25 mm + x1.4
0.8 sec @ f8
ISO 400
580 mkII + ST - 1E wireless trigger
Tripod
Pano crop


I've noticed that flash in nature photography seems to be making a bit of a comeback. Does it work?
Stephen Dalton was probably one of the best exponents of its use but I thought the modern work of Laurent Geslin was quite interesting:
http://www.wild-wonders.com/the_photographers_featured.asp?show=28

Cheers,
Chris

Thats a cracker, not sure that the crop is the best for the shot but a very high impact shot.

Hi Chris, looks like you had fun and captured a good fun image. I think a touch more DOF will have helped here and so maybe f10-11 would have just reached those hairs on it's abdomen and included the hind legs. In addition to a stronger crop, concentrating on the thirds with a little more space both top and bottom.

Kind regards and HTH

Brett

Great Pano crop, love that like the unoccupied space to the left giving the subject a sense of isolation, very good vision a tad more DOF like brett has said would bring the rest of him into focus more,Top shot though Chris

A high impact image, but I am not sure that the crop suits it. As far as flash goes, in the era when Stephen Dalton was first becoming well known (the early 1970s), we had to use flash on many subjects simply because film speed was too low for anything else. Dalton was a a great fan of Kodachrome II (25 asa). The flight shots he took were therefore impossible without use of flash.

Today we can use 400asa+ all the time, and increasingly higher shutter speeds as technology moves continually forward. I therefore think there is far less need for flash now, but the fact that it still has a place is evidenced by many fine shots on this forum, especially those where it is used as a fill in.

David

Thanks for the feedback, guys - agree about the DoF. As for the comp, I was after something a little less photographically conventional and more graphic.

Cheers,
Chris

That is a very cool shot and I have little to add to those nits already mentioned other than the trick is to make it look like flash was never used. So the giveaways on this shot are the highlights which are almost burned out. I know Matt Cole uses flash a lot and has his gun set off to one side and heavily diffused to disguise its use. It's not easy especially on macro shots of subjects liberally covered with hard shiny surfaces and personally I have never managed it yet, but it is worth persevering with in my opinion. This takes nothing away from your shot BTW which I really like.
Eric

certainly an interesting and original composition. I think I'd prefer a bit more room above the eyes and below the legs (so a sligthly taller pano). It does also look as though the flash has blown the whites (although this may be less of a problem on the full res).

As Eric mentions, I use flash on most of my high magnification shots (though not typically on lower magnification shots such as this). I didn't know it was making a comeback

Matt