I know I posted a while back with my first attempt at skate flash photography, but as I had owned my flash for all of about two days, I didn’t really know what I was doing with it. Honestly, it’s a bit embarrassing, but I went out shooting without fully understanding how the whole flash sync thing worked. Really, those are all effectively natural light photos.

I explain some crap I’ve learned here, in case somebody Googles “skateboarding, photography, flash” or something because they’re in the same position I was in. If you’re not ever going to shoot a skateboarder with a flash, this chunk is skippable. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s remotely interesting. Read it, don’t read it. Fuck, I don’t care, do you really need me to tell you how to live your life? Jesus.

Here’s where I went wrong, in the off chance that somebody might stumble across this post and learn from my mistakes: Most SLRs sync with the flash at around 1/200 or 1/250 of a second. Super high-end ones go faster than that, but that’s pretty average. If you shoot ANY faster than 1/200, you’re going to have part of your shutter in the frame. Here’s a quick example I shot:

As I increase shutter speed, I lose more and more of the frame to the shutter, which is still travelling across my sensor when the flash fires. This is an extreme example, with no ambient light. If you have ambient light, you won’t get a totally black bar, you’ll get a dark portion of the frame. I was already aware of this problem when I got the flash, and that’s what I didn’t understand: If I can only shoot at 1/200, how do I freeze the action of a skateboard? I’m used to shooting with extremely fast shutter speeds in natural light to get my skate photos. The shitty/funny thing is, there IS no place online to learn how to shoot skate photos. I can learn technique elsewhere and try and apply it to skateboarding, but I don’t always have the answers I need. Professional skate photographers are tight-lipped bastards, primarily because they have the sweetest job in the world (aside from the starving part). There’s a whopping ONE forum — whose focus is primarily video — with a single board dedicated to still photography, and it’s a horrible, horrible board. In all the information there, nowhere was it mentioned “with flash photography, the shutter doesn’t freeze the subject, the flash does.” I feel dumb for not figuring it out on my own (without actually having to go out and try it firsthand), but I really wish somebody would have just told me that. So I’ll say it again: With flash photography, the shutter doesn’t freeze the subject. The flash does. Of course, there are some caveats, concerning ambient light. Your flash fires way faster than your shutter is going to (1 microgazillionth of a second or something), which “burns” the sharp image of the subject onto the sensor (or film). Then for the rest of the duration of the shutter release (the rest of your 1/200th), ambient light is caught. The problem arises when there is a lot of ambient light — for example, high noon — and it’s just as, or more, powerful than your flash. Then you just have a blurry mess. But if the light is dim enough that you can kill it with a fast shutter speed, you can freeze stuff with your flash. Bonus: If you’re clever and frame your composition right, you can increase the shutter speed a bit and crop off the black bar at the bottom in post. I shot today with a slightly higher shutter speed than my camera technically supports and got usable exposures with some creative cropping or dodging.

So when I was younger I would flip through skate magazines and would notice this really obvious “ghosting” around the skateboarders. In many shots it looks like the skater is almost Photoshopped into the frame. Another one that always mystified me is the “translucent skateboarder” photo. I now know where this comes from. The ghosting comes from a flash shot with a relatively slow shutter speed (1/500 or lower) and a little bit of ambient light. The more natural light, the worse the ghosting. This isn’t necessarily BAD, I think it more often than not adds to the photo. The translucent skater comes from shots in which there is almost NO ambient light, but the photographer wants to expose the background (rather than leave it black). In this case, the flash fires, burning the skater onto the sensor, but then the shutter is left open (1/4 second, 1 second, whatever) which “burns” the background through the flash image of the skater. I don’t have a skateboarding example of this particular effect, but here’s a picture that demonstrates the technique. This is from a series I took with Cameron that I call “…what?” After that is a full-page ad out of last month’s Transworld that demonstrates how much ghosting is acceptable in a professional context. Trust me, I’ve seen photos with much worse, too.

So whatever, blah blah blah. I got some practice in at the Ed Benedict park today with about five different skaters. The Ed park is a pretty sweet plaza-type park that just opened about two months ago with some REALLY nice features (including these benches made out of…marble? Magic granite? I’m not sure. They may as well be made out of butter, they grind so nice). I didn’t get any phenomenal photos; in skateboard photography, the combination of composition and timing is difficult enough (not to mention things like “is the skater making a stupid face? did his hand cover his face? I caught the trick at the right time but does the board look good?” etc etc) without throwing lighting in on top of it. For my first try, I’m pleased, but I’m excited to see where things go from here.

The final picture is what made my photoblog tonight, and I normally try to refrain from cross-posting, so I processed it slightly differently. Two for the price of one! Left to right: 3flip, big spin, 3flip.