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Bouncin'

see this photo in my Gallery

Shooting a bouncing ball is very challenging. Not only one need to consider the background and the surface on which the ball bounces, calculate the time of exposure relatively to the time take the ball to complete the movement, and then find the right aperture for the correct exposure, he also need to know how to operate his flash(es) in the right manner, to get a good result.

Why should we care about the flashes that much here? Well, if we will not use any flashes here, we can get a great photo, in which the ball will be caught once, only once. It is mainly because we have one ball, and one click. Then, the one that will see the photo will have no idea what was the movement of the ball while the photo was taken: was it from left to right? top down? or maybe the ball was hanging in the air? anyways, if we want to give the feeling of a real bouncing ball, the technique is to use repeating flashes, while the ball bounces in our frame.

So we are going to use the flickering option of the flash (repeating flash), in order to catch the bouncing ball. Thus, in an exposure of 2 seconds, the flash flickers multiple times on the ball; each time the flash "catches" it in a different spot, so we see it several times in our frame. This way, we give the impression that the ball "moves" inside of our photo.

Mounting the flash on the camera is the simplest way to do this. The problem is, that then we result with a "flat" ball, which is less interesting. In order to give the ball a bit of depth, I wanted to put the flash in 45°. For this, I needed a flash that knows how to flicker independently, and the SB800 is great for that purpose. But as mentioned, I did not want it to mount on the camera, so I needed a remote cord to connect the flash to the camera. Unfortunately, I did not have this cable; so the only solution came up to my mind was to use Advanced Wireless Lighting (Nikon's term for using flashes in remote mode): use master unit and a remote one. My D300 camera does know how to function as a master, but not as a repeating master. Hence, I mounted to SB800 on the camera, and set it as the repeating master. Then, I placed the SB600 to be a remote unit, and as such it knows how to respond to whatever signal it gets from his master, and if its master tells it to flicker - it flickers!

If you are interested in the technicalities, i setup the SB800 to work as a Repeating Master (see page 76 in the manual). After many tries, I figured that i need something like 20 flashes in my frame, so i chose 20Hz with flash level 1/64, that will allow me 24 flashes per frame (see table in the manual, page 48). I set the SB600 as a remote unit. The camera was set to exposure of 2 seconds, and that is it (Oh, well, the aperture was f/8...)

Using this setup, I succeeded to create flickering flashes from 45°.

Thanks to my friend Rika for her SB800 flash, and for a great Saturday afternoon!