The Wonder Of Light

It feels like an age since I’ve taken any real images in anger, so I jumped at the opportunity yesterday to go along to the Irish Cross Country Mountain Bike National Championship race in Djouce Wood, Co. Wicklow and I had a lot of fun I’ll be the first to admit that shooting sports is not exactly my genre, let alone shooting mountain biking, but at the same time I was really interested to see if I could apply my “skills” and techniques to this sort of event. Kit wise, I kept it pretty light, necessitated more so by the walk into the woods than anything else. On my camera for the majority of the day I used the 70-200mm and for lighting my Quadra Rangers got another outing; which were perfect for an event like this.

Strictly speaking I’m not sure if you’re supposed to or indeed allowed to use flash when photographing an event like this, but for me it was the perfect opportunity to play around with off camera flash and none of the riders objected or seemed to mind. There were two setups used on the day. The first used two of the quadra heads, each powered by its own pack, one to the riders left and the other to the right – effectively cross lighting the rider as he came past. The lights were kept a good distance from the trail (10 feet or so), so I had lee way in terms of exposure and also in terms of the range of area where the flash was illuminating, so the riders could be captured in a much wider area.

I noticed some pretty interesting things/behavior. First and foremost, the Elinchrom Skyports used to trigger the quadras simply don’t have even close to the same range as Pocket Wizards. Even over such a short distance, there were a number of miss fires. Sync speed wise, I also noticed that I had my shutter set to 1/320 for a number of shots (trying to shut out some more ambient) and yet I had no flash sync issues, or certainly nothing noticeable. I appreciate sync speed is as much a camera limitation as it is a trigger limitation, but certainly in the past with Pocket Wizards, I would get noticeable shadow from the curtain if I was syncing at anything above 1/250. However, one feature on the Skyports which is REALLY nice is the ability to dial up and down the power of the pack. Particularly when mixing flash with ambient and with ambient light changing so much during the course of the day, this was a really nice ability to have. A video of the setup is shown below.

The second setup used a single Nikon flash sitting on a Gorilla-Pod which was attached to a tree and fired by a Pocket Wizard. To ensure a pretty quick recycle time and to try and squeeze as much life out of the batteries as possible, the flash power was dialed down which meant that the flash had to be placed pretty close to the track itself. This presented a number of problems, most notably being that the exposure sweet spot was much smaller in comparison to the shooting range offered by the quadras. So timing was pretty much everything here! A few feet before or after this sweet spot and the flash had no impact what so ever on the exposure. Also if the rider deviated from the trail, they were also under or over exposed. (you can see a shot of the setup below)

Not being able to dial up or down the power was also a pretty big disadvantage. As the power of the flash was fixed, controlling the mix of flash to ambient or indeed controlling the overall exposure was pretty challenging. As the ambient got brighter, I could dial it down slightly by increasing my shutter speed, but was limited to a maximum of 1/250. If ambient dropped, in reality I couldn’t increase the shutter speed too much to compensate due to the fact I was shooting moving subjects and needed to ensure that the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze movement. I was also shooting hand held at 200mm (with VR) so I was also factoring in the impact of shutter speed on camera shake. All these variables To give you a feel for the timing aspect and this setup, the short video below was taken on my iPhone from my shooting position. I was in prone position on the ground, shooting up the hill at 200mm. You can see the flash firing as the rider passes by and hear the shutter actuations on my D3.

All in all it was a fun day out and it was good to have the camera in my hand again. There were a fair few lessons learned and no doubt was I to do something like this again, I’d approach some things differently. But I’d actually be upset and probably quite bored if this wasn’t the case More shots of the day can be seen (and purchased) on Merv Coltons website.

Related posts:

1. How I Lit This Shot
2. Controlling Ambient With Shutter Speed
3. TTL Off Camera Flash & Joe McNally
4. Flash 101 (Technical Bits)
5. Flash Triggers – Optical & Radio

Tags: bike, colour, mountain bike, quadra, sport, strobist, video

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 9:26 am and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.