Quick Reaction

Have you ever found yourself as a photographer being put on the spot? You know, you're doing something and suddenly that is interrupted and you find yourself taking a photo with entirely differnt settings and not a lot of time to get the shot perfect? I suppose these are the times when I wished I was good as the old timers, you know the guys who can spit in the air and know exactly what aperature, shutterspeed and where they need to be with ISO, from how that spit hits the ground. Well truth be known, I am a huge fan of metering my light. I like to be in the ballpark and go from there. But there are those times when I just don't have the time to grab my light meter, so I try to start from a generic f-stop of f4 to f8 depending on the amount of light available, and a shutter speed of 125 with ISO at about 320. Then I will bracket from there if I have time. A perfect example of this situation was during a night shoot for a client. A gentleman in a pretty clean car kept cruising by and slowing down everytime he reached the area we were shooting. His lucky moment came as the model was having makeup freshened up. He jumped out of the car and bee lined straight towards me asking if I could please shoot the model standing next to his car. He was sitting dead in the middle of the road with cars approaching from the distance. The model was okay with it, and the client was okay with it as long as it was quick. I'm just not sure if the approaching traffic was going to be okay with it. Quickly, I posed the model next to the car and had my keygrip #2 guy grab my SB-900 flash and an umbrella. Which one, he replied, referring to the umbrella; the shoot through or the reflective? Any of the two I replied. By now the approaching traffic was only about a block away, and held by only a redlight (which I am more than sure was going to change super fast simply because I needed it not to). I quickly made a few setting adjustments and took the shot just as the light turned green. I told the gentleman to pull over and give his email to my keygrip guy and I'll email him the photo. I didn't really view the photo too much after shooting it, as I set my camera back to the settings needed for the shoot I was doing. When I finally did edit the photo the next day, I noticed that the flash had created some blowout in the photo but not too much to be distracting. However, the finished photo is amazing even if I must say. And the gentleman loved it and asked me for a quote to shoot more photos of his fast car. The photo made me look very professional in his eyes, but in the back of my mind I was patting myself on the back for having "quick reaction capability".