22nd
Photoshoot - 7miles boots
My friend David is local distributor of these amazing jumping boots (he’s also very skilled in using them), and asked me to shoot some promotional photos for them. We did majority of the shoot in the afternoon in available light, mostly to be able to do 8fps series.
But as it came to evening, and we had the shots we wanted, I suggested we do some flash lit “fancy” photos just for the fun of it. Do I have to say, these actually turned out as best of the shoot?
I had my two Vivitar 285HVs, with the custom battery packs, nikon SB-600, two lightstands, and the infamous “powerty wizards” - the Gadgetinfinity/Cactus V2s radio triggers (replaced them with Alienbees CyberSync later). Shot with D300 using 70-200/2.8VR from quite long distance.
Good thing about this sport is, you can kind of control (and predict) where the jumper goes. On the downside (there has to be some, right?), the jumper gets tired after short series of jumps, and it takes few of them to get into right pace. So in the end, you have only like 3 jumps out of 10 where he does the best trick, and it’s quite difficult to repeat quickly.
I placed the vivitars on lightstands - left to be slight side-light, and right to be slight front-light, so they formed kind of light cross-fire. Used bare flash on left side to get sharp/contrast details and shoot-through white umbrella on right for more smooth less defined fill. Both flashes were set to 1/2 power, and we did few shots like that - results were quite good, only missing a little fill from front.
So I just placed the SB-600 on the floor right in front of David (pointing up at him), with the stofen omnibounce diffuser,and set that to 1/4 power, so it was just really brightening the front-side details than really lighting them.
David jumped few more times with various tricks he had in the pocket, and yeah, one of them was our best shot of the day. More shots of the day can be found here.
