Light from an umbrella

This spring we had an assignment for portraiture class.  I can't remember exactly what the assignment was about, but my end result was this photo here of my wife Hófí:

My portrait of my wife, Hófí, where she's lit from inside the umbrella.

It was an overcast day, even a bit rainy if I remember correctly.  So I decided to tie my flash to the inside top of an umbrella and fire it off remotely, the idea being that the rain was staying outside the umbrella, and the sun was shining inside it.  I tried a few different compositions and also had my wife rotate the umbrella so that the flash was pointing at her from different angles.  The photo posted here is the one I liked best and subsequently submitted to my instructor.

And I was thoroughly happy about it, because I had done something I had never seen done before, not in that way at least.  Of course I might have seen something similar before and that mental picture got stuck somewhere right behind my left ear on its way to the rolodex that is my brain - but that's about it... I think.

And now for something completely... erm... kind of similar.  Yesterday, I was trying out Seesmic Desktop, a piece of software which allows me to follow my Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as add some Twitter searches to follow.  I punched in a couple of searches, one of which was "pratchett".  Now, that search term might not mean a whole lot to people west of the Atlantic, but Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld books, is my favourite author, and I would say that his 65 million copies sold worldwide indicate that I'm not his only fan.

Well, that search term generated quite a few tweets, and somewhere in that haystack was a link to a blog post titled "Why I'm going to the Discworld convention".  I clicked the link and to my amazed enjoyment (can I say that?) I saw a photo of Pratchett which reminded me more than a little bit of my own photo from this spring.

Terry Pratchett, my favorite author. Photo by Murdo Macleod, found on blog.dwcon.org.

Since Pratchett is also my wife's favourite author, we both found this quite amusing.

And one Discworld quote for the road, from Jingo: "Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."