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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Hyper Speed Sync for Action Sports Portraits: Anyone? | |
PureMichigan wrote:
Been looking at some of Dave Black's work and that of other greats who also have a mastery of sports lighting
I looked the guy up and watched a number of his vids.
Sorry to sound like an arse, but I failed to see anything cutting edge or that would put him in the mastery of sports lighting category to me. It's mostly basic strobist stuff being off camera lighting.
I was watching one Vid and my wife bought me in a Cuppa. She asked what I was watching and when I told her she looked and said ' But you were doing this with our sons soccer team when he was 11." She reminded me of a favorite pic and i looked it up on my computer and sure enough, 10 years ago exactly.
I was using a couple of 45 metz units I gerry rigged to a softbox with some hose clamps.
I used a similar setup (having just bought a set of Quantum radio slaves) for the same thing at the drag races at night. I put a flash on a tripod closer to the start line and went further up the track and shot when the cars hit a pre determined spot. Worked really well.
I had one guy come up to me and want to talk to me the the whole night about the setup. I saw a thing in a mag about 18 months ago about this shooter that does off camera lighting and what a legend he is for coming up with the idea. Could be the same bloke. If it is, good luck to him.
I have no interest in doing that work, Dropped it pretty quick when I discovered how little money was in it and I know there's a damn sight less now!
From what i saw on the vids, I don't believe a lot of what he does requires anything very special in the way of flash at all. In any case, there are a lot of Cheaper solution's than 8 OEM speed lights! Most flashes will go faster than 1/1000th and that is all you need to stop nearly anything. The rest is going to be product endorsement overkill.
You could buy some pretty decent portable flash gear for the price of 8 speedlights and the mounting rig and there would be a lot of upsides to using it over speed lights as well.
As an example, here is the godox portable studio flash.
http://www.godox.com/EN/Products_Camera_Flash_Witstro_AD600_Powerfou&Portable_Flash.html
Up to 1/10,000th of a sec duration. 1/8000 sync. 600W power, 87M range at iso 100 with STD reflector ( wasn't Dave shooting at 2000 ISO in the surfing shots? That's over 1/4 km range with this thing!) 500 full power shots ( try that on AA's in a speedlight!) 2.6 KG (got to be way lighter than the speedlight setup!) and best of all.....
It can be had for $600!!
How much is a speedlight in the US? $400? $300. Don't get me started on the triggering side of things!
Pretty sure you could get 4 of the godox units for a lot less than the 8 flash setups and they are going to kill the speedlight rigs in every way.
And the godox are the higher end, lots of cheaper alternatives under those.
Really, I don't see anything new or particularly different about what he is doing. It's a nice and pleasing lighting setup and certainly a lot beyond the normal way a lot of sports pics are done which gives it merit in itself.
To replicate this look, there are a lot of much cheaper alternatives, equipment and setup wise as illustrated above.
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Jun 02, 2016 at 07:51 PM |
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