8th
Photo shoot - Freeriders
Few weeks ago, I spent about two hours shooting these amazing guys. It was night skiing session in snowboard park in Rejdice, so it was all about flash photography. There was some ambient light around the jump from the big lights on the track, but it was really more of a “mood light” than anything else. Ambient light to be one less thing to care of then.
I had two Vivitar 2085HV’s with my custom battery packs, on standard air-dumped lightstands+flash mount tilt heads. I can’t say enough how easier the air-dumped lighstands are when trying to adjust flash height in freezing night. As for the rest of gear - Alienbees CyberSync radios to trigger the lights and D300 with 17-55/2.8 to catch the scene were used.
CyberSync being quite new radio system, you may ask how well they work - well, they work rock solid, only glitch I ever encountered with these was battery acting out in the freeze, replacing by new set solved the issue for good. I must say CyberSyncs aren’t best choice for sports/action photography, as the CSRB can do only as much as 3fps, there’s the new CSRB+ which might go up to 10fps. Shooting witht he sluggish Vivitars, fps was not an issue though.
So now to the actual shoot setup - placed each flash on one side of the ski jump, about 5m from the jump edge, as that’s where the action unfolds. Both flashes were aiming slightly back to the jump, but they still remained to be side lights (making strip of the light across the track). Both were about 2m high from ground, and fired at 1/4 power. Early in the shoot I decided to make it more interesting and used dark blue rosco gel on the right light to introduce some mood with color contrast.
How did the shoot go? It was fairly easy, given the guys had to fly through my light trap. Only hurdle for me was to pre-focus properly, as there was deep night all around - I ended up focusing on the edge of the jump and then the AF kept up pretty quickly when the jumper appeared in the cone of available light pointing at the jump.
Clicked a frame (all shot at 1/125s, f/5.6 with ISO between 400-800), and then it was just a matter of checking if the dude is still alive (some of the jumps ended more like big crashes), and waiting for another guy to fly towards me.
More photos are available here.
