I only shoot available light.

Available light is any damn light that's available (W. Eugene Smith). It's probably my most favorite quote regarding photographic lighting. And it's what this little story is about.

Last Monday I had the pleasure of attending the Chase Jarvis Twitter Meetup at Inner Space Indoor Skate Park. I don't like shooting in groups (never have) but I took the opportunity to do something I think nobody else there did -- and it involved stealing everyone else's lights.


Chase's team had set up stations of Broncolor strobes around Inner Space. We were to divide ourselves into groups and spread out and get some time on each of the stations. Like I said I don't really like shooting in groups. I'm not a misanthrope or anything. It's just that I have this thing about doing my own thing. Anyway as for my plan, it really wasn't a plan. I kinda left my group by accident and wandered around and checked out the scene. The talent were doing all kinda of cool jumps and spins off the boards and I was curious about what everyone else was doing.

I decided I'd shoot ambient and not worry about getting time on the strobes. I've shot skaters before and have some pretty decent lights of my own (not exactly Broncolor, but hey, you gotta start somewhere) so I didn't feel compelled get in line. On a couple of frames I had shot, I noticed that my timing was good enough to catch a strobe firing. Of course when it did, it blew the hell out my exposure since my camera was tuned to the ambient. The problem was that this was hit and miss. One shot would be good, the next way underexposed and too blurry. Then it hit me: I'd just set a trap to catch all the strobe light I could in one shot. The solution: looooonng shutter speed.

The reasoning to that kinda went like this: well, the strobes are Broncolors which means they have a very short duration and capable of freezing motion (i.e. flying skateboarders). So I just set the ISO and aperture to a suitable exposure for a strobe shot. I really didn't care much what the ambient did as long as it didn't blow out. (rememmber - every strobe shot has two simultaneous exposures and they have to work together to get a good result.) Then I dialed down the shutter speed to somewhere around a half second. I figured that was long enough to catch a strobe going off. I had to watch the action and the photographer at the same time and try to figure out what the photographer with the pocket wizard on his camera was going to do and then time it all to catch it as it went down. Sometimes the results were good; sometimes not but the good was pretty good if you ask me.

Below is another shot from the night. In this one, I added a little bit of spice to the recipe and spun the camera about the lens axis (not very smoothly I might add). The result is that orange and yellow lines and trails are actually the ambient lights (fluorescent tubes I think) and the trail is a record of how I spun the camera.

In full disclosure, there was some photoshop-fu on the tonality but hey, it's how I wanted it to look so it's ok by me.