Lighting test

I got a small LED light recently, and wanted to see if it would be useful for outdoor macro photography. It was, as long as I held it quite close to the test object (this small flower spike). But it was awkward to get the light in right place with my small tripod, and fiddly holding the light in one hand with the camera in the other.

Then I remembered that my flash gun has an FP mode (aka HSS) that I've never tried. It allows the flash to be used with a very brief exposure. The idea is to underexpose the daylight on the background so that the only light comes from the flash. Technically it worked fine, but as usual I forgot to stop down enough to get good depth of field on the flower.

This is the final result. The flash was triggered remotely to back-light the flower spike, while the LED provided fill-in from the left. I'm not sure the final result justifies the effort, but it gives me a couple of new techniques that I can practice on.