2013 365 30

Week 30 and my motivation for keeping going with this 365 thing has waned considerably, hence the fact that I'm two days late in posting this. Motivation for photography is pretty high though and I have a big weekend of roller derby and wrestling ahead along with some further playing about with my new fisheye lens.

22/07/13

A wee wander round Belfast with the new 8mm fisheye. Had an idea that I was looking for this sort of "X" shape and walked around until I found the buildings at one junction that made an almost perfect shape for the shot.

23/07/13

Was mightily cheered up today when the postie brought me a little envelope containing two rather fine F2.8 patches all the way from the USA. I cannot decide where to put them but they look nice.

24/07/13

Sarah: Daddy, what does that new lens do?
Me: It does stuff like this
Sarah: That's just weird

25/07/13

Loved this grab shot from roller derby. It's all wrong technically but the lens flare from my flash gun is eye-catching and the skull and crossbones on the glasses is perfectly sharp.

26/07/13

I picked this shot out not because it's the best from the weekend's bout but because it's a good example of where I am right now with my attempts to master derby photography. Three off-camera flashguns placed at turns 3 and 4 with two as key lights (set at 1/4 power) and one as a fill light (set at 1/8 power). The big difference was that I've now started to set a custom white balance based on the combination of overhead fluorescents and flash guns and it seems to have worked wonders in terms of providing accurate colour rendition. I'm a happy bunny, particularly given that I was able to set this up in somewhere completely different and it worked.

27/07/13

Wrestling and more wrestling. God but this is fun to shoot. This was an evening of debuts for new wrestlers so there quite a few characters on display. Things were a wee bit rougher round the edges than usual but it was still great craic.

28/07/13

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

New Year's Day Surprise

Woke up this morning (i.e. New Year's Day) to find that one of my Roller Derby images from last month had been awarded a third place by one of the judges in the monthly Roller Derby Photo Competition run by the F2.8 Fast Glass group. Only the second time I had entered some shots - mainly because I was pretty intimidated by the quality of the shots which other members entered. I was added to this Facebook group last year and have found it to be just a wee bit inspirational and challenging and I have picked up a hell of a lot of tips and ideas from the group - almost 400 members from all around the world wherever Roller Derby is played.

Although the quality of the other member's work is scary, I really loved this shot which I posted on the blog at the start of December. No excuses for re-posting it again.