Fun stuff!

More fun stuff!

So here's how it was done. Look for the bright spots, they kind of give it away:

Essentially, I'm hanging out in the trunk of a moving vehicle while our cyclist is carefully following, trying to hit his narrow mark.

The rig seems more complicated than it is. Two side lights, one top light. Now getting them out there is where it gets cumbersome. The side lights are PVC pipe, 7 feet long, I think, weighed down by sandbags. The top light is a 15-foot painters pole that's been telescoped out to about 11 feet. The strobes are attached via rubber bands - lots of them.

Now that they're out there, they need to be set correctly. First - they all need CTO gels. If you don't gel them, you won't get the natural skin color you so desire. Second - they all need to be zoomed (these are zoomed to 50mm), if you don't zoom the flash head, the spread will be far too wide - especially on the top light. Finally, set your power according to your ambient light. These are all set to 1/4 power - this allowed me to shoot without thinking about recycle times, but also get plenty of power when I needed it. Since all three lights were in hard-to-reach places and time was of the essence, we couldn't stop the car to adjust the power every time we wanted less flash power - that's why you leave yourself some wiggle-room with your aperture to increase or decrease the power of your flash from your camera.

I couldn't tell you for the life of me how fast we were going, but from my perspective, it was fast enough. I'll probably find out later that we were going 7 mph and I was freaked out for nothing. I probably should have been wearing a helmet myself.

What do you get when you combine 2 strobes, 2 CTO gels, and a cloudy sky after the sun went down? This, I guess. Both strobes are snooted to make some nice hard light. The most difficult part of this was shooting at 1/20 of a second without blurring the tree in the background.

Here's another, much farther away, and with the grass lit up a little bit:

The shadows give away the direction on the light, but that's OK, I like it like that - it's sort of like a spotlight-effect.

This last one was shot earlier - much earlier. The strobe freezes the tire while everything else is impacted by the panning. 1/30 sec worked out well - the pan turned out really smooth (very unlike my other 20 attempts!). DSRL = Guess and Check.