In this video I try and freeze a paintball in flight using speed lights!
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Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV, brought to you by
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and today I've come down to Driver Wood Paintball park to
to answer a question which is, can you freeze
a paintball in mid-air with flash?
Now in the last video we froze water
with flash in a studio but can you do that
outside with something that's moving much faster? Well there's only one way to find out
let's give it a go!
So the setup
is this, we've got Luke inside of this wooden cabin
and he's going to fire out across and hopefully I'll capture
the the ball in mid-air, that's kind of the idea and
I'm crossing my fingers. Now I'm going to use flash because we know from the previous video
that flash lasts for a very short period of time and it can freeze movement.
But let's try without flash first of all, let's give this a go you never know your luck.
Ok Luke are you ready? So what I'd like you to do is just fire across there, obviously without
hitting me or
any of the camera equipment would be very much appreciated, and I'm going to count you down to
three and then we'll fire, ready, 1, 2, 3.
Ok and once more if you'd be so kind,
ready, 1, 2, 3.
Ok well, incredibly and by chance
we actually caught one, but it's not frozen it's a long streak because its traveled
so far during the exposure.
Although I actually quite like that but it's not quite what we are after for this shot
it doesn't answer the question. So the question was can flash
freeze a paintball? Let's turn on some flash and find out.
So what I've got is two flash guns to cover this, I've got one inside of the hut
with a nice little soft box just to soften the light down
and illuminate Luke, and then I've got one outside
to freeze the paintball in flight, that's the idea but
with multiple lights the best thing to do is to set them up one at a time so at
the moment
just the inside light is on and I'm going to set my camera
up here so I'm going be shooting in manual mode, I'll shoot at the same
exposure as we had on the previous video 200th of a second shutter speed,
remember its not the shutter speed that freezes the action its the flash,
but I'm going to drop my ISO down to 400.
Well let's just take a shot without flash and see what ambient light view record at f/4.
So what we get is a pretty dark picture, but I can see some detail there so
there's something in the background.
Now I need my flash to illuminate Luke
at f/4, so I've got my flash meter
I'm just going to pop it underneath Luke's chin there
and I'm getting f/5.6 so that's a little bit on the bright side
I just need to drop the flash down just a little bit
and I've got it down to f/4
so the flash matches my camera settings
and if I take a test picture here we go,
you can see that gives a very dramatic
look, that really looks moody and that's kind of the look I want on Luke.
Now lets add in the second light and that's going to illuminate the ball, hopefully!
So for the second light I've got it set to 1/16 of its full power,
so that should give us enough light to illuminate what's going on but
enough speed to freeze the ball, remember from the previous video
the lower you set your flash the shorter the flash duration
the more freezing and stopping power it has.
Ok, so there's really only one way to do this and that's to take some pictures
I think the chances of nailing this on the first shot are very slim
but you never know and Luke are you ready? Ok so what I'm going to do is
I'm going to count you down to three
and then you're going to fire, again making sure we don't hit me
or any of the equipment. Ready 1, 2, 3
Ok so the flash is working fine but
I'm not capturing the ball and I don't think I can put that down to the flash I
have to be honest
I think thats down to my timing so what we're going to do is we'll try this a few times
and we'll see what we get. Ok are you ready?
On three, ready 1, 2, 3.
Now part of the problem is the amount of time I've given myself so
the distance from the end of the Luke's gun, to the end my frame is quite small
so that means getting the timing absolutely perfect is critical
not easy but it's possible you might want to find something like a trigger trap
or an I O shutter to sound trigger this
I don't have those so what I'm going to do is back up a little bit and give myself
a bit more room and hopefully nail that ball. Ok here we go
ok, are you already on three, ready 1,
2, 3.
We got one!
Brilliant!
There we go, it did work we did actually managed to
freeze the ball in flight using little speedlights.
So the answer to the question, can you freeze a paintball outdoors with speedlights
is yes you can, eventually,
it does work! What we're going to do now is to get my favorite picture
into Photoshop and we will do a bit of post-processing on it and we'll do that right now.
So if you're wondering just how many pictures did I
actually take until I nailed the final image I'm not going to tell you,
it was quite a few let's just put it that way. However,
the end result was well worth it have a look. So here's the final shot, here's the
paintball frozen
in mid-air but when I go closer I can seem yes it's frozen but there's also a little
bit of motion blur
because of course I'm still recording some ambient lights, I can see some
detail in the woods behind and that's just giving that little tiny bit
of motion blur, I could clone it out but
I'm just not overly happy with that. However
this shot which was taken with the ambient light I like
this movement of the ball I really like that, it add's some
action and speed to the image but I don't like the noise from the high ISO
that I had to shoot at.
So lets have a look at this one, this was my very first
test picture, and this was the closest shot I had to Luke
and this one for me really works well. So the plan is this,
I'm going to create my own streak, kind of paintball effect
onto that test shot and fortunately
Photoshop can make that really simple. So the first I need to do is to come in
add a brand-new
empty layer that's the one that we're going to add the paint ball on, and then I'm going to
make my own paintball,
so I'm just going to get a paintbrush, I've got orange as my foreground color,
I've got a lovely soft brush but it needs to be about the same size
as the barrel so about there, and I'm just going to a drag a nice
straight line by holding SHIFT and clicking and drawing. So
there's my paintball and its doing that motion thing but it's not really
blurry and it's the wrong angle.
So lets do the blurry bit first, just go to filter,
down to blur, and motion blur
and with motion blue, I'm going to put motion loads of motion blur on this lets really make it
quite blurry, like that.
Now motion blur works fine
but it really makes
both ends blurry and it's sort of sharper in the middle
so what I'm going to do it I'm just going to get the erase tool and we'll just erase this back
because I'd like it to appear to be sharper or
more obvious at one end, and then blurring out at the other end.
Ok so that's going to come up here but obviously the angle isn't quite right
because it has to match the barrel of the gun, so I'm going to use a bit of free
transform
lets go to edit, Free Transform, and we'll just give this a bit of a rotate around and we'll just try and
I'm just going to try and line it up with the gun barrel, something like that,
I might even stretch it out a little bit farther, there we go
and its going to go about there, that looks better, and we'll click on the tick.
So now we have that nice streak going through but it's a little bit obvious,
so I'll take the opacity down just to blend it into its surroundings like that.
Now I could stop there but I'm going to do one more thing
and if you remember from one of my previous videos when we were out in the woods
shooting a Red Riding Hood
themed shoot, I added a ray of light with some ray light rushes,
now I'm going to use them again, we'll put a link down in the description below if you to
download them and try them for yourself.
But what I'm gong to do is make a brand new layer and I'm going to get a paintbrush,
I'll make sure my brush color is white that's really important
and I'm going to add in a little puff of smoke at the end of the barrel
using the ray of light brush, so let's get that one there,
and we'll make it really small something like that, there we go and
we'll just click on the end there and you can see thats going to add in a little puff but of course
it has to be in the right direction, so let's go a bit closer and then I'll use
free transform
again, lets go to Edit, and then down to Free Transform
and I can rotate this around pop it in about there
and if I go for perspective on my distort by right clicking the side and we can just
add in a little kind of puff like that, there we go, that looks good,
just drop the opacity down just so it really blends in just a
hint of something coming out the end barrel and that works really well.
So there you go, there's my final paintball picture completed.
Now if you'v enjoyed this video, and you want to see more videos from myself
and the other amazing presenters here on AdoramaTV
you know what you've got to do, you've got to be clicking on the subscribe button,
I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching!
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