There’s specific studio lighting know-how you’ll need if you want to try your hand at catching an athlete mid-air with an arc of powder around them. Read on to find out what you need to do. Oh, and this shot comes with a warning, too…
Isibel’s family came in for a regular shoot together, but with one additional request. Isibel asked if she could be photographed doing her favourite pastime: gymnastics.
We’d agreed to this in advance, so she brought her tumble mat with her and set it up in the studio after we’d captured all the family portraits. Her mum suggested we use gymnast’s chalk to add drama and movement, but we weren’t sure if this would be unhealthy to breathe in once airbourne, so we used flour instead.I asked Isibel to hold the flour in her hands and throw it as she jumped. When doing this type of shot with professional dancers, you have a lot more control over the timing of the jump and the movement of the flour. When kids are involved, however, it’s more important to keep it fun, with lots of laughter and no pressure.
This means it took a few attempts (and a lot of flour!) to capture this shot. The flour you can see below Isibel was fallen flour from previous attempts, picked up by her feet. This wasn’t intentional but I do think it adds to the image!
Hold back the power
Normally, studio flash fires just once and has to fire exactly when the camera’s shutter is fully open. It’s only at this point that the whole of the sensor is visible at once, allowing the flash-lit scene to be rendered evenly across the frame.
Otherwise, black strips of underexposed areas will appear across your images, caused by the shutter curtains blocking the light from reaching the sensor as they travel across it. On most DSLR cameras, the shutter is fully open at a shutter speed somewhere between 1/160sec and 1/250sec. Check your camera’s manual for the sync speed – this is the point at which the manufacturer has programmed the electronics to reliably trigger the flash while the shutter is fully open.
The pulse of your studio light is much faster, usually starting around 1/1000sec. This is perfect for freezing motion, like a jumping Isibel mid-air. But if you increase the flash power, that pulse gets slightly longer. The longer pulse can result in visible movement of your subject during the duration of the flash, giving a blurred ‘ghosting’ effect in the image. To avoid this, you need to make sure your flash heads are set to fire as fast as possible. One way to do this is to lower the power – we found that around half power worked well, combined with the ‘freeze’ setting on my Profoto units.
This setting pumps more power into the tube and then compresses it, so that the flash pulses as quickly as possible. This helps to freeze motion a little…