Went to a news conference today for the Norwich Union Glasgow Grand Prix athletics event which is taking part in Glasgow on Sunday 3rd June; after the newspaper boys had gotten all of their cheesy posed shots, I managed to snag two minutes with athletes
Craig Pickering and
Jason Gardener with the intention of getting more dramatic, portrait style shots for the WireImage boys.
Details behind the shots:
The sky was very washed out with impending rain or thunder and, knowing that fill flash alone would restult in 'flat' shots, I opted to create some drama with the aid of a few trusty SB-800 strobes and a pair of lightstands.
The remote strobes were set up to the left and right of the athletes at about 90 degrees to the lens axis and roughly in line with their eye levels. The strobe camera left (Wireless group A) was set to full manual power, the one camera right (Wireless group B) to 1/2 power. Both strobes had orange (tungsten) balancing gels placed on them.
The on-camera SB-800 was set up not to add any direct flash to the scene - it was merely used as a trigger for the remotes. The intent was to slightly underexpose the ambient scene and use the strobe output to light the subjects with a warm glow akin to a low sun. It was actually 1pm with the sun high and to my rear through the omnipresent cloud cover.
The camera was set to f/8, ISO 200 and 1/250 second exposure - this provided an adequate balance between sharpness of image and the slight underexposure of the background that I wanted.
The camera's white balance was set to Tungsten so that the athlete's skin tones would appear normal, if a little warm, compared to the background - remember that Tungsten gels were on the remote flashes? A tungsten WB will turn a grey sky blue but, without appropriate gels on your flashes, your subjects skin tones will be way off.
All in all the setup / teardown for such a shoot takes about 8 minutes in total: assemble the light stands, set the remote strobes correctly, mount them, take a test shot or two and then do the actual shoot.... you could do this even quicker if working with an assistant
