A few people have shown interest in my photos from the recent Fuchs Nationals event at WSID and the way I used off camera flash so I figured rather than replying to each individual question i’d simply post on the blog for them to read.

One of the things I find most difficult about shooting drag racing is finding a way to be different to the other 20-30 photographers out on the track. If you’re creative it’s not too hard to do so, me on the other hand that’s a different story… haha

As you may know, on camera flash at the track is real hit and miss, doesn’t always give you a good exposure and when the sun goes down and the wind drops to almost nothing you have smoke lingering around and all you pretty much get is a whiteout in-camera. One way to help avoid this is to move the speedlite off the lens’ axis.

With that in mind I decided to buy a set of Elinchrom Skyports. Similar in function to a pocketwizard but a lot smaller and also a fair bit cheaper. Range is still fantastic and so far i’ve had nil failures. My skyports have managed to take a small swim in a puddle, fallen off the camera and bodyslammed the dirt and still working perfectly!

After accumulating the required leads and bits I trundled to the track on the afternoon of Day 1’s qualifying. Arriving just in time for the final pairing in top fuel I Promptly got each speedlite set up with it’s receiver, stand and adapter cable and placed it on the track wall where I thought would be best. Positioning was always going to be trial and error. after a few passes I soon found the most desirable positions. Front speedlite approx. 5m in front of staging beams, pointing back at the centre of the track where the beams cross the dead centre. On the 580ex2 I found that zooming the head to 50mm worked best here.

Setting up the rear speedlite was going to be a little more tricky due to the variation in lentgh of a top fueller compared to say a super sedan or doorslammer (or pro mod as the yanks call them), so I set it up to suit a TF and roughly 10m back from staging beams. I kept the rear speedlite at around 1/2 ratio with the front one so as not to generate too much relfections or hotspots on the side panelling on the cars. You will see in some of my photos what I mean here.

One of the things that really impressed me with shooting this way is the ability to make the vehicle ‘pop’ in the photo without any or with very little post processing. Here is an example of a photo that had absolutely no work done to it. It was taken in jpeg mode on my camera, imported into aperture and exported straight to my gallery…

Compare this to a photo shot with on-camera flash:

Yes, it is a different vehicle but you get the idea..

Of course it is all a matter of trial and error. One thing that I have learned so far is that simply mounting the flashes on the wall at the track is not high enough. Especially the rear one when group 1 teams are on track, they love to have 10+ people around the rear of the car. Every now and then you find people block the flash and so on. Mounting the speedlites on a light stand and setting it to around 2.2m in the air (and obviously 1m back from the wall to give photographers access to the wall) will be the best option, this will also ensure that the body gets better coverage from the flash.

The other thing that has caught me out so far is trying to balance the flash’s colour temperature with that of the xenon lights installed by Musco at WSID. between now and the boxing day event I will be making every effort to try and colour temp match the speedlights two the lighitng at the track. Once I get a figure from Musco I can grab the appropriate CT correction filter and fit it to the speedlites for a uniform colour balance.

A couple of the people who have asked about the technique had also asked for rough settings for this type of thing.. Obviously they do change a fair bit, most common settings for me seemed to be as follows…

• Front flash @ 1/2 power
• Rear flash @ 1/4 power
• Iso 1000
• Shutter speed between 1/125 and 1/250
• Aperture mostly 2.8, sometimes F4.
• Manual control
• Camera is Canon 1d mk3
• Lenses used were 400 2.8is, 70-200 2.8 and 24-70 2.8

And now for some photos!

In this photo you can see the rear flash has provided some highlight in the smoke from the burnout. you have good coverage of light from the front and can clearly make out Alan Dobson’s facial expressions.

Here you again see fantastic detail on Terry Sainty’s face. Check out those eyes! Also note the rimlight formed on the rear tyre and the distortion on the tyrewall.

Here is an example of just how natural lighting this way can look. You can only slightly notice a couple of hotspots on the track from the flash, aside from that the rest of the photo looks like natural lighting.

Bikes seemed to work really well with this lighting.

Of course, not every photo has to be of on track racing.. I slapped the 400 onto the camera and went trundling through the pit area to see if i could get some decent shots.. I wasn’t disappointed, though some (most) people did look at me weird..lol

I will be trying a couple of variations of this setup at the next nitro meeting on boxing day and I will post the results when i’m done.

Tags: 580ex2, boxing day, canon, canonitis, circlework, Drag Racing, elinchrom, fuchs, hillary will, nitro, off camera flash, photography, skyport, speedlight, strobe, top fuel, wsid

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Camera Stuff, Drag Racing, Lighting, Misc Stuff, Random Weirdness, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.