I get a lot of questions from other photographers about how I work when I’m covering sports. This post is dedicated to you guys. :-) Monday I went on a snowboard shoot with a few friends near Bogus Basin. This will show the things I’m thinking about as I went about it. Some days I work totally differently and set up a shot completely before anyone hits it, which works better for shoots where I’m working for a client and they have something specific in mind. On this one, I didn’t have to worry about that so I just took my time and tried a few different ideas and developed something new when I combined them together at the end.

All were done with a Canon 1Ds Mark III, a 17-40, and two 580′s on pocket wizard multimax/plus II’s.

The parking lot vogue shot… The flash was actually set perfectly right when I turned it on :) Usually I try to relax and joke around at least for a little while when I’m working with new people, it helps them loosen up around the camera so they can focus on their riding.

This is the first shot I took of them actually riding.  One flash, no gel… just trying to get warmed back up. Flash is to my right on the other bank, zoomed in pretty far so it won’t fade too much as the go along the pipe.  I was short on plastic bags, so I put all the gear I wasn’t using in my camera bag (waterproof), then covered it with a pile of snow for it to equilibrate.  Usually if you take warm gear into cold snowy weather, snow will stick to it, melt, then go inside of it, then re-freeze.  Which is pretty bad for electronics, much worse than just getting wet.  But if you let it get below freezing and then take it out and use it, the snow won’t stick to it at all and you don’t really even need to keep it covered.

Dropped the shutter speed down to pan a little.

Thinking about switching to the other side, don’t really want to move the lights though.  If I move to the other side without moving them, I’ll end up casting shadows across the shot and pick up shadows from the rider on the trees.  There’s things I could do with that, but it works better in urban or just less wooded environments.

You can see the ambient light dropping down a little bit over time.  I’m waiting for the light to get right to where I can fire flashes at about two stops over the ambient so that I can use gels and tweak the color a bit.  Strobe power was around 1/2 in these.  They’re pretty boring at this point.

Slightly changing the angle and opening up the shutter a little turns it into a whole different shot.  I took a few shots, didn’t like it, and moved on.

Those would be fine if I were doing print sales, since it’s a nice simple setup and you can move pretty easily if they decide to focus on something else (though usually riders will focus on what you’re at).  You can just sit there with the same setup and get people as they go by and not worry about anything going wrong.  Gear has now reached equilibrium, however, so it’s time to do something more fun.  I added CTO gels to both flashes, and put the second flash in place; it’s off to the left and you can see the shadow it’s throwing on the PVC from the safety cone underneath.  When the tonal range gets flat it’s time to switch from supplementing the ambient to overcoming it.

The first two were a little low on the flash, but switching ISOs and fixing the shutter speed fixed it.

The left flash wasn’t firing reliably yet – water absorbs the exact frequency the remotes use to trigger. Which is kind of annoying for snow shoots. You have to get the antenna a few inches off the ground and have clear line-of-sight, which means low angles are harder to get to work.  I think this next misfired because the batteries were low in the flash.

I’m still dialing in the second flash; it’s a lot closer, and it’s hitting the PVC from 90 degrees rather than 20-30 degrees like the other, so it’s a little more problematic to use when zoomed in.  The next couple shots show the difference in moving halfway down the pipe.  Mediocre light vs Sweet Spot:

Now that it’s working predictably I’ll take a few of everyone, and they’re finally nice and warmed up, so I can get a little closer.  I’m happy with these for daily work, but they’re not quite portfolio shots.  Once I’ve got a good set of these I’ll move on to something a little more difficult but potentially more rewarding.

Starting to move around, I like the silhouette and how it lights the snow.  I usually light snow with cross-lighting to keep things clean, but the grungy look might work pretty well somewhere.

Just watching how it behaves.

Same here.  The original flash is behind me about 15-20 yards, up 15 feet.  Still giving nice consistent lighting across the whole scene, except for the part I’m blocking.

Riders are getting into it by this point, so I’m trying to have something useable from each pass.

I now have something from everyone, so I can play as much as I want.  Wide-angles, same lighting setup, no ambient.  I like the texture on the snow and the negative space.  Small subjects in big spaces are always interesting to me.

I’m ready to move on now; this jib is pretty much exhausted.

Dylan wasn’t feeling the pipe, so we went down the hill a little and set up here.  It’s just a ride on a road cone, but the snow is starting to fall and it looks pretty nice backlit like the ones earlier.  I’m thinking I’ll turn the falling snow blue with a bare flash on it, then have a flash with a CTO on-axis to her face to light her up.  The flash ends up bouncing off of the snow a little and lights the trees too, it’s at about 35mm here.

Just seeing what it looks like with flash right into the lens.

The main flash got blocked here.  We’re out of ambient (it’s at about 1 second, ISO 1600), so Dylan is hitting this with a little bit of light from a truck’s headlights down at the road.  The backlight doesn’t work either; it’s way too much once all that pow is flying.

I had Kenrick (below) stand in for a few so Dylan could set up, then had him take a run.  The truck was leaving so we were out of light to see the jump after this.  I zoomed the flash out to 14mm, and it ended up getting the exposure perfect and lighting up the snow off to the sides and the trees.  Much better.  I repositioned the camera + remote a little bit to fix the reception.

It worked good on Kenrick, I fixed the angle and went wider, fired a couple test shots to make sure the lights were firing right, and then Dylan took a run at it using the tail lights of a car driving by.  She nailed it!  Money shot!  :)

When it’s that dark, you see the residual image from the flashes in your eyes for a couple seconds afterwards; we all knew it was the shot of the night.  I took the landing shot too, just to see it.  The trail is nice, and you can tell she knows it was the perfect shot too.