A Little News

Shooting high school football in my part of the world means shooting flash. There is not stadium in our coverage area where you can shoot available light and there is no real good way to shoot flash. I have tried TTL mode, A mode, get down on your knees and pray mode and every other mode available on any flash. Really, it is the only thing that makes me yearn for the good old days of film. I could turn on my EOS strobe and fire away with dead on the money accurate exposures. Not so my Nikon digitals. If I leave it on TTL, or any auto mode, I get wildly inconsistent exposures from blasted, washed out over exposure to basically no light at all. I have used an off camera shoe cord and elevated the flash on a bracket. I have used the flash in the hot shoe. Sounds pretty hopeless doesn’t it.

Finally, I found a solution, sort of. I had tried everything else and finally decided to try manual mode. Lo and behold, it actually worked . . . most of the time. I realized the much of the action was happening at roughly the same distance from me most of the time. This meant that a manual flash output would at least give me more consistent results than I was getting TTL. It is not a perfect solution. Kids running too close to me get too much light on the first pop or two. Kids too far away don’t get enough light. On balance, this is still the best method until someone comes up with a TTL method that actually works.

There is an additional downside to shooting action with the 1/250th shutter speed limit and the limitation of flash. You get ghosting on some photos. This happens in any reasonably well lit facility indoor or outdoor. I like to have the ambient light in the background, otherwise you get real dark, ugly shadows behind your players. The trade off is ghosting. Ghosting is the motion blur that happens when the flash doesn’t fully overpower the ambient allowing movement to happen between the frozen moment produced by the flash and the rest of the time the shutter is open. There is a whole bunch of technical mumbo jumbo about flash duration and shutter open time but there is no need to get a head ache here. Suffice it to say that ghosting happens because the flash is faster than the shutter.

The best lens I have found for my manual flash solution is the 30o mm. We have some really old 300mm f2.8s here at the Daily and I don’t use them. They are so slow in the AF department that they simply can’t keep up with the action at f2.8. My friend David Higginbotham has a 300 f4 he loans me from time to time and that works great. I can set the flash to 1/4 power, shoot at ISO 1000 and the focal length keeps the action at about the right distance for the flash. My normal set up is an 80-200 f2.8 which also works but the action can get a little too close for an accurate flash exposure. So then class, the ultimate solution is to pray and shoot a bunch of frames.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.