Comments on: Skateboarding + Fireworks = Quality BTSV

By: Charles Stafford

Charles Stafford — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:59:00 +0000

I have been thinking about doing something very similar. Nice shots.

By: Jens Marklund

Jens Marklund — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 20:16:00 +0000

Uhm. If the first shot was dark enough to use a slow shutter speed, shouldn’t it be possible? Snoot some flashes with a short flash duration (to freeze the skater while not affecting the rest of the enviroment), and trigger it/them manually while he’s in the middle of the trick. I would say that the flashes you used, had too slow of a flash duration and the light wasn’t focused enough. So the scene went way too bright, and you got that nasty ghosting as well. Also, how does the skate scene look upon composites? I know they’re really strong about using shots where the trick was actually landed, or nobody would care.

I might be wrong about everything though. If people are interested in this type of combination, search for the lakai fully flared intro. It’s pretty intense.

http://www.Jensmarklund.com

By: Dave Lehl

Dave Lehl — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 19:03:00 +0000

Actually that was what I tried first but it didn’t work for a couple of reasons…. One was that in order to get the light trail from the sparklers I was doing a 2 or 3 second exposure. Despite my best efforts to make it as dark as possible in there (it couldn’t be completely dark since the skaters needed to see what they were doing), the overall ambient image was still pretty bright. Add to that a couple of flashes going off, and the entire scene was super bright. Also there was a ton of ghosting going on which wasn’t looking good. In order to get the skater sharp with a dark background behind him, I was shooting at an 800th of a second. Normally I do everything possible to do everything in-camera, but it just wasn’t in the cards for these shots.

By: Eric Duminil

Eric Duminil — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 18:57:00 +0000

That was my tought when I saw that the skater was in the middle of the lighttrail.
The advantage of this method would be to avoid post-processing and to nail the shot in only one skate move.
The advantage of 2 shots are that it’s probably easier to shoot (you only concentrate on one thing at at time), easier to adjust separately as layers in PS, and maybe avoids ghosting/shadow from the skater during the move.

By: Bert McLendon

Bert McLendon — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 18:21:00 +0000

Yes you can. Would save in post. Nice twist on the normal skateboard shoots.

By: Brett Jackson

Brett Jackson — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:34:00 +0000

could you do it all in one shot with long exposure, and then just fire the flash manually when he was in the middle of the slide, or would that look junky?