Roller Derby Redux- an enlightening experience.

 
 
    I was finally able to make it back to shoot the San Diego Derby Dolls again, after roughly a year of not being able to make it to bouts.You can read about where I left off last time in this post. I said back then that I intended to try setting up some remote speed lights, and this time I did. I also pushed Excalibur up to ISO 25,600 for a few shots without flash just to keep playing with expanding what I thought (mistakenly, it seems) were the limits of the D4.

   While it is totally awesome to be able to get good shots at such a high ISO,

   I have to say that adding the flash worked much better than I ever expected it to.

  A while back I attending a speed light workshop, and one of the instructors talked about his wedding  reception setup, which basically was a triangle of remote lights to cover the dance floor, and how it gave his images depth and made them stand out. Guess he knew what he was talking about. The difference between the lit images and the ambient, high ISO ones is astounding, and I wasn't even really good with my light placement, since this was a first effort.

  I got in early before the start of the first bout, and placed a couple of lights where I thought would work, and used the dolls warm up time to test things out. Since the distance between the skaters and the lights would be different each time, I started out trying TTL, but I never seemed to get it quite dialed in, even when I bumped the ISO up high the lights were still working too hard and I was only getting single shots. So I decided to go manual. I wound up settling on ISO 3200, which let me get away with shooting at 1/640sec at F5.6 and still only needing 1/4 - 1/8 power on the speed lights, which meant I could get 4-8 shots per pass with flash.

  During the break between the bouts, I repositioned the lights because I didn't like the coverage I got on the first bout, and the second setup worked much better. I was limited to two lights because I only had two super clamps to attach to ceiling piping, and didn't want to restrict anyone's view by trying to set up light stands. Next time I will grab more super clamps and set up additional speed lights, because I didn't like being restricted to a small area while I was shooting. I think with 4 lights I could get decent coverage on the whole track, if I had 8 I could get excellent coverage of the track. One of these days I may actually have a gear budget, if I can ever figure out how to get someone to pay me for this stuff! (speaking of which, if you want to help me out ever, you can still go fund me!)

   So how did I set up at the end? If you think of the track as a clock with the start line at the 9pm position and the Dolls skating counter clockwise, I put one light at the 1 o'clock position shooting down the straight towards 6pm, you can see that one in the last image above, and the other at 10pm shooting across towards 2 o'clock to cover the curve. I did most of my shooting between 9 and 12 O'clock. Overall I was very happy with the images, the dolls and their fans loved them, and their comments on the images and how amazing they looked definitely made the extra time and effort of trying the flash setup out worth it. Can't wait until I get another chance to try again, until then, you can see the full gallery from the night here and let me know what you think.

    And finally, the more observant and dedicated readers might have noticed the new water mark, a friend of mine designed a logo for me, as well as an updated cover image for the book, still making progress!