26th
Painting with strobe(s)
We recently did this shot with my friend (who did the running in this picture :) ), just for the fun of it - to try multiple flash exposures in a single photo (often called light painting). The most iconic photo of the shoot is this “stadium light” shot of the car, which is actually done with single bare speedlight flash (sb-600), hand held & hand fired.
So here’s how you do it:
First you need fairly open area, so that the flash light goes just to the subject you want to paint with light, and doesn’t bounce from walls or ceilings nearby. Also it has to be completely dark at the time of the shoot (so ideally you’ll be shooting this during night, or when the sun burns all out).
Place your camera on a solid tripod, so that it doesn’t move during the long exposure (30sec type of long exposure). The actual exposure time is all up to you, or more precisely your running skills - it has to be long enough for you to run/walk around the subject, and stop for a manual flash fire few times.
We went for 30sec (or so), which gave us enough time to walk around the car, and do several flash pops. Important thing is to stop during the flash exposure, or you risk to get the light “smudges” in your picture.
With lens set to around f/8 to get the whole car in focus, we found 1/4 power on the flash unit about right. For the flash triggering, you can use either the test button most flashes have, or even hook the strobe to radio slave, and fire the wireless trigger unit’s test button.
You can experiment with flash positioning, but having uniform shape formed around the subject looks best for start, so hold the flash unit in same height during all exposures and try to keep the same gaps between the pops.
