- Today on The Slanted Lens, we're going to show you how to freeze action with
strobes; not a high speed sync but freezing with actually mono blocks and
normal flash mode. I'm going to use a trampoline, my Baha B4's and a warrior
princess to illustrate this principle. Let's get started and see what we can do.
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First, to understand how to freeze action
with strobes it's important to understand how strobes work; and more importantly how
your strobes work. They're all very different, you need to figure out how
yours works to apply these principles. Strobes are simply a flash of light; most
things that flash it's immediate, because to our eyes it happened so fast we think
it just happens all at once, that's really not the case at all. Strobes have what is
called a flash duration, the amount of time it takes for a strobe to come to peak
power and then the to tail off. Flash duration on a chart is like a shark's fin,
it makes a shark rise up and then a slow fall off kind of a tail. T-5 records the
amount of time that the flash duration is above 50%. T-1 represents all the time
that the flash is burning from the time its above 10% to back down to 10%. So
consequently a T-1 gives you a much better idea of the flash duration because 50% of
the light is happening underneath that 50% mark, so what's happening in the long tail
off and that can cause burn on your subject. So when you buy your strobes,
look at a T-1 flash duration rating, that will give you a true idea of just how long
flash duration is.
Nowadays, and the Baha B4 has this, there's modern technology that is called
IGBT technology. It basically acts like a switch, that turns the flash off quick and
cuts it and gives you a very spiked flash duration. It cuts a little bit of the
power out, but that spiked flash duration is very short and allows you to stop
action much easier. So there's something else you should check out when you're
buying your mono blocks, do you have IGBT technology. For our photoshoot today, I'm
gonna do three things to freeze the action; first, I'm gonna dial the power
down to 50% on my Baha B4; it's going to reduce the flash duration as I dial the
power down. Now not all mono blocks will do this, like the Einstein it actually
lengthens the flash duration when you dial the power down. So it's important if
you're going to apply this principle that you look at the manual for your mono block
and see if shortening the power actually reduces the flash duration, on the Baha B4
it does.
Second, I'm gonna shorten my shutter speed until I
get a clip from the shutter speed on the image. So I'll start out at 30th, 60th and
I'll keep dialing it faster and faster until finally it clips the frame; and then
I'll step back one step and that will be my shutter speed. Third, I'm gonna use the
oldest trick in the book; maybe not the oldest trick in the book, but it's
certainly the second oldest trick in the book. It's simply a matter of I'm going to
shoot at peak action, everything that goes up has gotta come down. So there's that
moment when it's going up, when it just pauses and then it starts to come back
down. Now I may not be able to hit that exact moment every single time, but I can
be very close to it. If I can shoot at that moment I'm gonna be far more likely
to freeze the action because the subject is not moving near as fast. So there you
have it. Dial your power down, get the fastest shutter speed you can and shoot at
peak action. Let's apply that to our warrior princess and see what we can do.
I've got a trampoline set behind the wall that she's going to jump on. She doesn't
have to get very high to look really good, it's just below the surface of the wall,
she just takes a little jump to get up in the air, pulls her legs up underneath her
and it looks like she's way up in the air. It also sets me up so that she's going to
go up and then come back down; I don't want her jumping over the wall towards me
because now my focus is changing. I want her to go straight up and straight down, I
can keep a plane of focus, I can find the peak action, is a perfect time to shoot.
Okay, let's look at our lighting break down and we'll get started shooting.
My first light is a Baha B4 with a reflector on the camera left side. It's
going to open up the smoke a lot more than this image shows. It'll open up the smoke
on that left hand side. My second light will be a strobe set up on the camera
right side deep in the background. We actually put it on the roof in order to
light the smoke from behind. That's gonna give us a nice rimless smoke on the right
hand side. So two lights in the background for my smoke; camera right, camera left.
This next image shows our third and our fourth lights. Up front we have a medium
soft block with a grid as our key and for a rim light we got a Baha B4 with just a
reflector on it. It gives us a nice little rim on the cape and on the side of her
hair. There's a few other things that are going on in this shoot. First we've got a
fan on camera left side that's going to blow up underneath her cape. We tied a
rope to the cape, it catches the wind underneath the cape and becomes like a
sail, it kinda flows behind her. We're also using two smoke machines; we've got a
Rosco Vapour Plus in the background. It's loaded with stage and studio fluid and
it's pointing right through a fan. That fan dissipates it, kinda throws it out
into the air and and makes it a lot softer. We have a second Rosco Vapour,
it's going to be on the camera left side. So we have one on the camera right, one on
camera left. I use the stage and studio because our neighbors are complaining that
the smoke is packing into their yard and their house and they're just complaining.
So we use the stage and studio, it gives us a big burst, but then dissipates very
quickly and doesn't flow into the neighbor's yard. It also goes through a
fan to kind of break it up and gives us a nice wall smoke behind our subject matter.
For a few of the shots we had an air cannon behind, we blew some leaves and
materials towards her back just to give another dimension of stuff exploding
around her as she jumps over the wall. So here's a few of our images before we did
our retouching.
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The last step is to take the image into Nik software and work on it. You know,
first, I'm gonna add a bleach bypass later. I love bleach bypass, it takes a
lot of the color out. I can control some contrast issues in bleach bypass. Then I
added a light blue colorizer layer. I then added a contrast layer and last of all I
added the Vignette. So there's our final image. So this was shot for Dynalite. It's
going to be an ad that'll run in PhotoDistrict News. I guess I should say
an ad that's already ran, at this point, in Photo District News, so check that out.
I hope you learned something about freezing action and you can apply it to
your strobes and to your situation so keep those cameras rolling, keep on clicking.
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The hardest part of the process of doing
imagery is doing estimates. It's the scariest thing a photographer ever has to
deal with. How do I estimate something? If you go to TheSlantedLens.com/estimating, a
digital download is there. It will teach you all of the things you need to do to
put your estimates together. It's got templates, terms of agreements, everything
you need to know to be able to put your estimate together, so go to
TheSlantedLens.com/estimating.
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