Here’s a shoot from a couple of weeks ago, the brief was pretty simple, we needed some sharp crisp and a little different to the norm.
What I wanted was pretty simple , I wanted to nock the ambient down a good three or for stops to really darken off the background and to allow me to use the flash duration as the shutter speed. To light up Chris the Kayaker and freeze the action giving the really unusual look to the water that high shutter speed photography brings.
Unfortunately due to restrictions to when we could gain access to the venue I was going to have to shoot it in late afternoon sun, this would normally cause a issue due to the flashes limiting you to shooting at 1/250th max, you could adjust the aperture or use a ND filter but this really saps power from the flashes, and is a bit of a work around than the ideal solution.
To get round this I used the pocketwizard Flex and mini system to let me sync my flashes to 1/2500th of a second, helping me to kill the ambient and freeze the water. it wasn’t as dark as I’d like but the ambient wasn’t bad.
The next step was to get the lights up, pretty simple three light set up, the lights both sides of the run are key and the one the other side of the pool is fill, I would of liked to have had a reflector on the fill light to give me a bit more reach to the subject but the hire shop didn’t have any more available.
Like a lot of these sort of shoots its very much a case of trial and error and shooting a mass of stuff to get the frames your looking for. Over the course of 2 hours I shot about 100 frames which gave use three great frames to work with.
Massive thanks to Chris Chapman and his sponsors, who pretty much paddled non stop for well over two hours, to make sure we could get the shots we wanted as well as the Nene Whitewater Centre for letting us use their great facility.
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