tennis practice

These are two more images that I shot as part of my last assignment. One moving on from the strobe setting I tried for the basketball shoot, the other testing my newly acquired and practised photoshop skills to put a subject into a background.

The background I shot for this was by chance, I had intended to shoot a friend who had a hockey match that evening but it was called off due to a frozen pitch. I shot the pitch anyway to use as a background, I got what i could in the 10 minutes the floodlights were left on for. On my way out the tennis courts next door were still lit up for someones coaching session. It was frosty and misty and the floodlights gave a purply haze which I think looks good against the orangey 'clay' court.

This shot was an idea in my head that took a little trial and error to get (also thank you to my very patient model!) In the end I used two flashguns (set on strobe) behind him, one pointing directly forwards the other towards the space where the racket would swing. I left the shutter open as long as I needed to get a nice shape of the movement.

downhill trails

Another location shoot, this time I wanted to try hi-speed sync. I found a keen biker through a friend and off we went to Leckhampton Hill in Cheltenham.

In order to freeze the motion of the bike on some of the jumps and let the bike 'pop' out of the picture and leave the background a little murky I wanted to use the hi-speed sync function in the flash, (which allows you to override the 200/second max shutter speed in the camera and still fire the flash.)

It didn't quite work as planned as my flashes are Nissin (di866's) as opposed to Canon ones and need a dedicated sync cord rather than trigger for it to allow the higher stutter speed. But, 200/s seemed to be sufficient to freeze the bike over the jumps though this is something I will be trying out again (with said sync cord!) 

For the shot with the puddle I used a flash each side of the track to highlight the splash of the mud, pretty simple but I like the highlights on the edge of the tyre and in the splash.

the Jump Shot

For part of my last assignment I wanted to do a location shoot  using my flashguns (inspired by the workshop we had in class - my post Something out of Nothing). I wanted to try out the strobe setting to play around with the movement involved. As it happened I got some quite nice shadows on the wall behind too. I also tried to make the most of the location by using the walls as a coloured background to shoot a portrait.