NIKON D4 ISO 400 1/5000 SEC. F/4
When photographing action and sports, you can use a Speedlight to freeze the action for a more dramatic portrait. This chapter explains the settings used to capture action using fast shutter speeds combined with the High-Speed Sync setting, as well as discusses how to show motion using the Rear-Curtain Sync setting combined with slower shutter speeds. Keep in mind, however, that using a small flash to capture the action creates an action portrait , and you shouldn’t try this approach to capture a sporting event as it unfolds. For example, you won’t see a photographer on the sidelines of a football game using an on-camera flash, nor will you see a bunch of light stands sitting on the sidelines of a track-and-field event. But you can set up great action portraits using the techniques in this chapter.
Freezing action using a flash can produce great images when done right. It can also produce images that look as if the flash just blasted light into the scene, destroying the mood of the image and creating a photo that just looks wrong. To understand how to achieve the first and avoid the second scenario, you need to revisit sync speeds and the High-Speed Sync feature. As you may remember, sync speed was covered in Chapter 9 , but now you need to examine it more closely, in particular how it relates to freezing action.
The sync speed is the highest shutter speed you can use that will still allow the flash to fire a single time between when the front curtain opens and the rear curtain closes. For most cameras, this is a shutter speed of 1/200 or 1/250 second. So, if you have the Speedlight on the camera (or attached via a TTL cable) and are using a shutter speed of 1/250 second or less, the flash will fire after the front curtain is moved all the way out of the way and before the rear curtain starts to close.
The issue when photographing fast-moving subjects is that a shutter speed of 1/250 second is not fast enough to freeze the action. For example, if you are photographing a tennis player serving a ball, you need a shutter speed of 1/1000 or even higher, and to capture the water drops frozen in the air during the water polo photo that opened this chapter, I used a shutter speed of 1/5000 second.
With the High-Speed Sync capability of the Nikon Creative Lighting System, the flash fires multiple times as the front and rear curtains travel across the sensor. What this means in practical terms is that the flash has to fire multiple times during the exposure, and each of those flashes of light needs to be at the same power or the exposure will change in the middle of the shot. As covered in Chapter 9 , you can turn the High-Speed Sync on in your camera using the menu system.
The amazing part of the CLS and Advanced Wireless Lighting is that the High-Speed Sync feature works with the off-camera flashes, meaning you can trigger the off-camera flashes and get proper exposures at shutter speeds higher than 1/250 second. In Figures 13.1 through 13.3 you can see the sequence of events: As the front curtain opens, the Speedlight fires; then, as the rear curtain starts to close, the flash fires again and again, creating an even exposure throughout the whole shot to produce Figure 13.4 .
Figure 13.1 The flash fires as the front curtain shutter opens before the rear curtain starts to close.
Figure 13.2 The flash fires again when a new piece of the scene is exposed to the sensor as the front curtain opens and the rear curtain closes.
Figure 13.3 The rear curtain is fully open, and the flash fires again as the rear curtain is about to close.
NIKON D4 ISO 800 1/500 SEC. F/6.3
Figure 13.4 The final image is properly exposed and doesn’t look as if it was lit with multiple bursts of light.
There are two great reasons to use the High-Speed Sync feature when taking these types of images. The first is, obviously, to freeze the action, but it is the second reason that can really add that something extra to the photograph. By using High-Speed Sync, you can use a wider aperture to create a more shallow depth of field in bright sunlight and still get great lighting. If I am photographing outside at a 1/2000-second shutter speed and at f/3.2, for example, the background will go out of focus, keeping the attention on the main subject.
When you’re using Speedlights in the High-Speed Sync mode, the flash needs to fire multiple times in quick succession. The flash fires so fast that it looks like a single burst of light, but it actually a series of bursts timed to match with the front and rear curtain traveling across the sensor. This means that the flash needs power, lots of power. The first, and most important, thing you can do is make sure you have freshly charged batteries so that the flash gets all the power it can. The second thing you can do is use the remote flashes in Manual mode so that there is no pre-flash, which means the flash can use all its power for the main illumination bursts of light. You will also want to make sure you have plenty of spare batteries so that you don’t run out of power. The batteries will drain much faster when pushed using the High-Speed Sync feature.
The best way to deal with the need for more power is to use more than a single Speedlight. You can use multiple Speedlights grouped together to create a single light source. If you use two Speedlights at half power, then they each need only half the power to match a single Speedlight on full power. This cuts down on the recycle time and extends the life of each flash.
Using a multiple flash bracket is the key because it allows you to use multiple Speedlights in the same modifier. My favorite flash holder is the McNally TriGrip (Lastolite, www.lastolite.com ), which holds three Speedlights and allows you to rotate the flashes. This enables you to position the Speedlights so that the sensor can see the Commander unit when the flashes are in the TriGrip. You can see the TriGrip in use at the end of the next section, when I use three Speedlights to illuminate Tim performing a karate kick.
It’s easy to freeze action using a fast shutter speed and the High-Speed Sync feature. It is a lot more difficult to show motion in a single frame. If you use a longer shutter speed, then the subject will be blurry as it moves through the frame. A little blur is a good thing because it shows movement; a lot of blur is usually a bad thing because the subject becomes difficult to see. In Figure 13.5 , the slight blur on the back wheel shows that the racing wheelchair was in motion.
NIKON D2X ISO 640 1/100 SEC. F/3.5
Figure 13.5 The racing wheelchairs are moving extremely rapidly, and the blur in the wheel shows that. If I’d used a faster shutter speed, the motion would have been totally frozen, making the subjects look like they were standing still.
When adding a flash to the mix, the solution is to use a shutter speed slow enough to see the motion and then use the flash to freeze the action at the end of the exposure. The default mode on most cameras when you use a Speedlight is for the flash to fire as soon as the front curtain opens all the way, which is at the beginning of the exposure. You can change this so that the flash fires right before the rear curtain closes, which is at the end of the exposure. This doesn’t matter much when using fast shutter speeds but makes a world of difference when using slower shutter speeds. Compare Figures 13.6 and 13.7 , for example. For the first shot, the flash fired at the beginning of the exposure, meaning the motion was captured after the flash fired. As you can see in Figure 13.6 , this resulted in light trails that indicate motion (the lines of green) in front of the toy car. I captured the same scene in Figure 13.7 , but this time, the flash fired at the end of the exposure and the motion appeared behind the subject. I know that in Figure 13.6 it appears that the car is moving backward and it looks wrong, but that is what happens when the flash fires at the start of the exposure and then the subject moves.
NIKON D700 ISO 400 1/2 SEC. F/5.6
Figure 13.6 I photographed this remote-controlled toy car using Front-Curtain Sync with the light trails in the front of the car.
NIKON D700 ISO 400 1/2 SEC. F/5.6
Figure 13.7 Photographing the remote-controlled car using Rear-Curtain Sync puts the light trails behind the car.
Setting when the flash fires is done on the camera. The setting is usually called Rear-Curtain Sync or Slow Rear-Curtain Sync depending on the camera’s exposure mode. Look in the camera manual for your specific camera for exact details of how to set the flash mode to Rear-Curtain Sync.
For Figure 13.8 I used a shutter speed of 1/1.3-second shutter speed to create an interesting effect: You can actually see the shadow of Tim behind him as he kicks. The shadow is where Tim was standing when the shutter was opened; then he kicked, and the flash fired at the end of the exposure, freezing Tim in place in mid-kick.
NIKON D750 ISO 400 1.3 SEC. F/5.6
Figure 13.8 I captured Tim performing a snap kick using a slow shutter speed and Rear-Curtain Sync.
To capture this shot, I used three off-camera flashes mounted in a multiple flash holder and bounced out of an umbrella ( Figure 13.9 ). The Nikon CLS and Advanced Wireless Lighting allows you to fire the off-camera flashes using Rear-Curtain Sync.
Figure 13.9 You can see the setup used to capture the image in Figure 13.8 .
I used the same technique for Figure 13.10 . This time, instead of moving from right to left through the frame, Tim just shifted from his right to left and moved the escrima sticks at the same time. The 1/1.3 shutter speed and the Rear-Curtain Sync froze Tim at the end of the exposure.
NIKON D750 ISO 400 1.3 SEC. F/5.6
Figure 13.10 The subject moving during the exposure before the flash fired caused the double-exposure look to the image. The flash firing at the end of the exposure created the sharp focus on Tim.
Note
Another way to show motion is to use the Repeating Flash functions of the Speedlights, which is covered in Chapter 10 .
Capturing action with Speedlights, especially when using the Speedlights off-camera, is a lot easier with the High-Speed Sync and Advanced Wireless Lighting features that are part of Nikon’s Creative Lighting System. The ability of the camera to use shutter speeds higher than 1/200 second means you can freeze the action and still add the light from your Speedlight. Chapter 18 walks you through four examples of action portraits from start to finish using the ideas discussed in this chapter. You’ll go behind the scenes not only for my shoots with Tim and Andy but also for action sessions on the golf course and soccer field. For example, when taking image of Andy ( Figure 13.11 ) I used a slower shutter speed along with a Rear-Curtain Sync and a panning motion with the camera to capture the motion of the mountain bike moving on the trail.
