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rear curtain sync

How to combine strobes and LED lights for captivating sports portraits

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Light painting can be a lot of fun, and it’s even more fun when you combine it with regular old flash to create dynamic and interesting images. Portraits, particularly of athletes or dancers can provide the perfect subject for experimenting with this technique as it appears to show movement in a still image, which is what sport and dance are all about really.

In the video below, photographer Bee Trofort shows us how she captured these intriguing images of an athlete using a combination of Spiffy Gear’s innovative wrist wrap light bracelets, the KYU-6.

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How to shoot high speed action photography with flash and a slow shutter

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With so many ways to be creative in photography, I get really excited with many ideas for a photograph. One area I find very interested is sports action photography, but with a twist. It’s great to capture that split-second moment and have that frame frozen, but I wanted to explore capturing the motion and freezing the action all in one go. Above you can watch the video of me using this technique with some karate students.

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Sony shooters need wait no more, the Godox X1 triggers for Sony are now available

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Sony’s decision to go with a hotshoe design that no other camera system in the world supports has meant that Sony shooters have typically been limited to using Sony’s own expensive flash units, or going with some array of adapters that may or may not allow them all the functionality they need out of their flash units.

A short while ago, we mentioned that Godox, along with a few other gear announcements, had planned to remedy this situation by adding Sony capabilities to their X1 trigger system.  Today, that promise was made reality and now the Godox X1T-S has been officially released.

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Photographing The Movement Of Dancers Using Speedlights And Long Exposure

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Photographer, Phillip McCordall, has put together a great video tutorial explaining the how he uses a combination of studio lighting, slow shutter speeds, and rear curtain sync to create almost atmospheric photographs of dancers, such as the photo you see above. While there are many applications in which you can use this technique on, the graceful leaps of the dancer are really eye catching when you are able to illustrate the motion of them, too.

If you’re not already familiar with rear curtain sync, this could be a really fun project for you learn it with. To put it briefly, when shooting with a rear curtain sync, the flash will fire at the end of the exposure rather than the beginning of the exposure. When used with a slow shutter speed, this allows you to record motion (as a blur) using only the ambient light at the beginning of the exposure, then right before the shutter closes, the flash will fire and freeze the motion.
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