How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Practice!

As anyone who has checked out my blog before will know, I shoot for the Belfast Roller Derby team. Thus far I've been relying on shooting using ambient light during bouts, but have also been jealously eyeing up other derby photographers' work (mainly from the USA) and particularly those who shoot using a variety of off-camera lighting set-ups. I recently took the plunge and invested in a couple of Nikon SB-700 speedlights to compliment my existing two older and cheaper flash units and decided it was time to try out these in the derby setting.

I was thankful for the advice I have been given by a number of other more experienced shooters, which set me on roughly the right track. Last night was my first attempt.

The last shot is probably my pick of the bunch since it is the shot where it all came together. I had two slave flashguns shooting at roughly 45 degrees to the track, both of which were being triggered by another flash on the camera in master mode. The off-camera flashes were set to 1/2 power with the on-camera flash set to 1/8 power to provide some fill light. Shutter speed was set to 1/250 at f 4 and ISO sat comfortably at 400. The shots were generally pretty sharp and I was starting to get shots where the skaters are starting to "pop" from the background.

I still have some issues with this type of set-up. It's too static for my liking and seems to only give a fairly narrow coverage in terms of the track - maybe about 20ft. In the past and using my 70-200 f2.8 lens I could cover the whole of one of the straights on the track and part of two corners. I can't move around as much as I'm used to, although there is the possibility of using my second camera body to take candid/portrait shots in between jams. Being more static and relying on flash also meant I couldn't use continuous shooting mode - timing is more of an issue and I shot fewer frames than I would normally do. My lights were almost wiped out on at least one occasion by a wayward skater flying off the track. Don't think this is covered by my household insurance. I also found that my non-nikon flash was less than reliable and didn't fire in around 25% of shots - this would be a concern for me, although I haven't tried using my wireless triggers with it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with what I got