Though I love him as the center of my world, I sometimes do like to do photo outings with my husband safe at home watching TV.

This shot was one such moment. Hey hon? Stop reading now, kay? :)

10pm, I'm huddled in a dark cave under a pile of huge boulders off in the woods. The air temperature is maybe 40 Effs, (~ 5 Cees), so all the snow above is melting and dripping. I try to find an area between drips to set up my gear, but really it's a lost cause and everything I'm carrying is just soaked. I'm wearing snow gear, so I'm warm and fine, but I'm worried about my gear. Still, I haven't gotten an interesting image yet...

So. I grab a flash, gel it incredibly warm, queue in a 300 second exposure, and start climbing.

In darkness. Lit with naught more than a tiny trace of moonlight coming in that crack in the roof, I'm bouldering my way forward to get out of the cave through the back door (the lower hole of the two you see in this shot).

Goal #1: don't break anything. Not my flash, not an ankle, nothing.

Waterbottle falls out of my jacket a few times. After the third time I set it down in a patch of moonlight behind a boulder from the camera, promise to come back and not forget it. Keep questing.

Goal #2: sneak out that back door of the cave, pop the flash a few times.

Happy to say, both goals succeeded. :)

Anyway, story mode off, I filled in the color on the rock with about nine flash pops. Three behind the camera, three out the back door and to the left, three out the back door and to the right. The image was massively overexposed on the sky, but that was expected. My intention was to see what happened if I used the shot as the base exposure of an HDR. Two other shots, no flash involved, gave me better tonal coverage of the sky and moonbeams. Loaded the whole thing into Photomatix an hour ago, and what do you know, it worked.

And best of all, I didn't break anything. :D

I'm bouldering my way around these boulders, lit by naught more than a little moonlight spilling in through the very crack in the world that I'm photographing. I sneak out of the scene in three different directions: up and through to the left, up and through straight, and backwards. Flash a few pops of the flash in each spot (1/1 power, aimed at snow or some big diffuse reflector in each case).

Frame was done by the time I got back. Way over exposed on the sky. Lots of beautiful warm colors on the rock.

Somehow I managed to not break anything. That was my #1 goal. #2 goal was making a useful frame, and overexposing was in the plan.

Then, I built an HDR of it. Just to see what it would do. I mean, of the three images I pumped into Photomatix Pro, only one had the flash pops in it. But oddly enough, it worked just fine.