Thanks Gary and Craig, I must give credit to one of my Old Farts mates who introduced me to the world of high speed flash. There are many applications where it can be very useful, especially with portrait work. What I was looking to do above was to produce just enough light to illuminate the subject but not enough to reach the background. It worked. It is worth learning about.
another way i sometimes use flash is to do a long exposure so its ambient dark then hand hold the flash and manually trigger it so i can paint a subject with loads or little patches of light. handy for doing macro, you can use one flash to get all around a subject if you need to
Another fine image that would be difficult to settle on which is more important in the scene, the shadows or the highlights .
think this might be a better colour picture, the reason i say that , the shadows draw me in because its hard to see what is there. i feel like i want to bring up the shadows, as this would lead to blowing out the high lights with one exp maybe then you think of doing a hi/low blend with 2-3 images. then you end up with a less dynamic range pic. which is why i think colour, to bring detail into the picture without altering the hi/low ratio i did try a crop on it, but decided against it, but put it back in when i saw another of the image in south island thread, i'm guessing is the same mountain in colour over there?
I have gone back and had another go at this image. Past this point, the more I try to lift the dark area, the more the image starts to degrade. But thanks for everyone's input. Gary
Thanks for having a go at this image. Yes it is the same area. You could easily spend weeks in this area, and not run out of photo opportunities Gary.
Gary, looking at the photo, I think a different time of day where the sun is a little more overhead it would increase the light in the dark shadow areas in the foreground but it may brighten the highlights in the far background a bit too much, still an interesting shot for discussion.
I don't mind a good Black & White conversion Gary. This was done in PS by blending 2 images using the Calculations method.