Friday, January 20, 2012

Alpine Ski Race, off-camera flash

This is a photograph of an alpine skier racing on the giant slalom course. The race started in the late afternoon and lasted after sundown. I decided to get some action shots using an off-camera flash at one of the gates. Most of the high school races are on weekday afternoons/evenings and there usually isn't enough available light for the whole race. An on-camera flash will work but it isn't acceptable to blast the athletes head-on.
I positioned a speedlight so that it was facing a gate and would light a skier from his side. This allowed me to position myself downhill from the gate and photograph the skiers from the front. The speedlight was mounted on a monopod that was stuck into the snow and it was fired with a wireless trigger. 70-200 lens at 145mm. 1/800 at f/4 set manually, ISO 500. The speedlight was on ETTL (auto).