Outdoor Action Flash Photography on a Budget

Capturing
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Winter is coming, and I want to try to do some outdoor ‘action’ photography while snowboarding / paragliding.

I really like the crispness and pop that powerful strobes fighting against the sun give these types of images. Tristan Shu has a lot of great examples of this in his portfolio: http://www.tristanshu.com/

So the question is can this be done on a budget both in terms of money and space/weight?
Can 1/200s result in usable images of rapidly moving subjects?

I currently have a Sony a6000 and RX100II that I plan to use for this. Flash wise I own a YN560III.
Overpowering the sun with the YN560 is tricky give that the max sync speed of the a6000 is just 1/160s (actually in practice 1/200 works too).

So here are the options I see:

More YN560s

They are fairly cheap, I could get or lend another 3.
That would already be annoying to carry/set up and I’m not sure that it’s enough.

Go HSS

The main benefit I see is that I could generally lower the smearing (due to ambient light) by using a higher shutter speed. There are two drawbacks. It requires more expensive and vendor specific flashes and the ratio of flash to ambient doesn’t seem to change too much (due to the amount of power lost when operating in HSS mode).

Use the RX100 II

I don’t know why (I speculate it’s due to the operation of the electronic shutter), but with the RX100 II I can sync at 1/2000s. Not sure if this still works with a remote trigger but worth trying. The drawbacks is of course the fairly limited performance of the camera (AF tracking, noise, dynamic range). I’d also like to shoot wide angles as the RX100 II only goes to 28mm that would mean stitching which might or might not work.

HyperSync

It could probably get me the effect I want to but it’s vendor specific and not available for the a6000. I also find it quite hacky. :smiley:

Reflectors

A giant portable parabolic reflector would of course be cool, turning the sun against itself. But as far as I know it doesn’t exist and a regular reflector probably won’t work over the distances required. :frowning:

Fake it in post

Not exactly elegant or trivial either but I think boosting the shadows and adding contrast to a crisp image at 1/1000s might be easier than getting a mushy but decently balanced image at 1/160 sharp.

I want to avoid a vendor specific solution, I don’t want to spend a lot of money or carry/set up a lot of gear. Is this even possible given the constraints? I don’t really like any of the options above. Is there another option that I messed?

If anyone read all of this, thank you. I tried to make it shorter but I couldn’t.

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I’m answering myself here but I came up with another possible solution: racing the shutter.

At 1/400 I don’t get flash light in the top fourth of the image. at 1/500 it’s a bit more than a third.

Because the shutter goes from top to the bottom this usually cuts off the top. If I can place the subject (and influence of the flash) in just two thirds of the image, and orient the camera so that the ‘cut off’ part’ is in the other I should be able to get away with 1/500. That would be much better. :smile:

So in practice, moving the subject and light into the top 2/3 of the image against a halfway distant background (the sky? :smiley: ) and holding the camera upside down should work up to 1/500.

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The RX100 II has a leaf shutter so it’ll work to extremely high sync speeds. My GR is likewise. However, at those extreme speeds (above 1/400 or so, in my experience with the GR) you lose flash power if you use a wireless trigger. With a wired trigger, depending on the particular flash, you might start losing power at 1/1000 or so.

Your best bet is borrowing a Ricoh GR and the Ricoh 21mm wide-angle converter for it which supposedly has surprisingly good quality. Alternatively, you could just get the converter, and hack a way to get it onto your RX100, which may or may not work depending on how close the entrance pupil is to the front of the lens body. That would get you to 21mm equivalent with high speed sync at the least cost.

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Yes, this is a real pain the butt to balance. It’s trivial once we get into using HSS, but really close to not possible without it.

(I have to admit, the idea of racing the shutter is awesome, and now I will have to go try it when I get a chance).

Of course you had to make it even harder by wanting to freeze fast action while doing all of this.

The limiting factor here as far as I can tell is the shutter speed. This alone is what is going to freeze your action at an acceptable level of sharpness. So you need to get it as high as reasonably possible within your constraints.

So,

  1. Have you tried to see what various shutter speeds will give you in terms of some type of action you expect to shoot? Could you go out on a sunny day and shoot some test shots of various actions that may mimick the anticipated speeds you want to shoot? (Jogging, running, jumping, etc…). That may give you a better idea of what your target shutter speed should be for acceptable levels of sharpness?

    Once you know this, you can start to plan around it.

  2. HSS is likely going to be your best answer overall here, I think? If you find that hitting 1⁄800 is where you’d like to be, then this is probably the easiest route. :frowning:

    Didn’t Yongnuo recently release some HSS compatible flashes/triggers? (Still vendor specific, I think).

    You may be in luck! There’s an article over on DPReview where the user jamesdo apparently had some luck using an on-camera flash that is HSS capable (Metz 50AF1) to trigger the (sensitive) optical slave YN-560 at higher shutter speeds (he shows up to 1⁄8000 working) :smile:

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  1. Fake it? If you know your shoots will be taken from a particular location, could you kill the ambient and let the flash power freeze your action, then shoot a second frame of the background? You might be able to combine them into an acceptable composite final result?
    This may even be a good option for racing the shutter? This way you can have a better exposed full single frame to blend the top 2⁄3 - 1⁄2 of the shot with?
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[quote=“CarVac, post:3, topic:448”]
The RX100 II has a leaf shutter so it’ll work to extremely high sync speeds.
[/quote]Ah, that explains the high sync speed.

I don’t think I know someone who owns one nor would I feel very comfortable taking some one elses camera with me when out to no good. But a cheap used one could be an option. :slight_smile:

Shutter Speed and Flash Power. :smile:

[quote=“patdavid, post:4, topic:448”]
HSS is likely going to be your best answer overall here, I think? If you find that hitting 1⁄800 is where you’d like to be, then this is probably the easiest route. :frowning:
[/quote]Can a Speedlight with HSS@800 (or higher…) compete with the daylight on a bright day (let alone at high altitude in the snow)? I thought the flash power loss due to HSS is almost as big as the ambient loss due to the shorter shutter speed. Do you know if this is true?

[quote=“patdavid, post:4, topic:448”]
Fake it? If you know your shoots will be taken from a particular location, could you kill the ambient and let the flash power freeze your action, then shoot a second frame of the background?
[/quote]I doubt it. I made some experiments doing this for portraits where it did work. But it required the flash to be very close and stopping down to a stupidly small aperture (f/22 or something like that).

Why on earth do all of these (modern?) camera things need to be so proprietary. Intentionally b0rked systems are so frustrating. :frowning:

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Disclaimer: I am not a HSS shooter.

As I understand it (again, not a HSS shooter), HSS normally triggers a compatible flash to fire off multiple, high speed strobes at significantly reduced power. This is for the duration of the shutter being open.

I found this from Canon’s Japan site:

Apparently it pulses the flash at a lower output at around 50kHz for the duration of the shutter being open. Which would explain the power loss. :slight_smile:

This is why I found the tests using the HSS-capable flash as a master to be neat. If it works, you might be able to fire the YN560 at least around ½ power (apparently flash duration of 1⁄1359)?

http://gock.net/2012/01/flash-durations-small-strobes/

I’d really like to try this myself…

Couldn’t agree more… :tired_face:

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I tried that a while ago with an YN-560 (not the III as in the post) and it didn’t work. YMMV.

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Will you consider the wide angle converter on RX100 approach? It might work well enough for your purposes.

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[quote=“CarVac, post:8, topic:448, full:true”]
Will you consider the wide angle converter on RX100 approach? It might work well enough for your purposes.
[/quote]The RX100 already has suboptimal corners so I’ll probably just try stitching.

In general I decided to just try and see what I can do with my current gear which means no flash photography in the midday sun.

Might still try to find a solution to it in the future, but right now the options for the sony system are very limited and lock me in to that system which I don’t want.

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