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I think i have shared some of my skateboarding shots, this is something that i enjoy doing very much. I am a very big fan of skateboarding, i think its quite amazing what some of these kids teens and adults can do with a wooden board with 4 wheels on them. I skateboarded for a while, its always been a on and of thing. I m very jealous of these guys over at the Malmö skate park because they are really good. And most of them that "hang out" over there are 10 to 14 years old! Some of these have a bright future ahead of them in this sport

Now i have a few questions to "freeze" the action. To get the correct metering (i.e the sky correctly exposed and the boarder) i cannot seem to freeze action.

I shoot in manual and set up the correct exposure before i start shooting. Now i usually take pictures of these kids/teens when its an overcast/a bit of sun days. And yesterday i was out taking pictures of them as well as skateboarding myself.

Now to the question, i don't have alot of experience when it comes to "action" photography. Below is an example shot:

EXIF:
Camera: Nikon D40X
Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture: f/9
Focal Length: 18 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Flash: SB 600 on 1/4 -7 power





Now i cannot seem to freeze the action correctly at that shutter speed if you look at the original shot here you will see that there is some blur going on which i dont want to capture.

Could anyone suggest on what i m doing wrong, what settings i need to use etc.

Metering mode: Matrix
Mode: Manual

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Hi Alex,

Well, assuming that you need f/9 for depth of field reasons and given that you have no control over the amount of light available the trade-off is between ISO and shutter speed. If you want a faster shutter speed then bump up the ISO to compensate.

Bob.

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Hey Bob,


I was using the f/9 to decrease the amount of light that would get into the shutter due to the sky (it would been very bright if i was using something like f/5.6 for example). And while with the flash i cannot use a shutter speed faster then 1/200.

I wanted the whole shot to be some what "perfectly" exposed, and that wasn't possible without doing what i did. But this lead to some motion blur as you can see.

Thanks for the advice.

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In the menu of the D40 (its on the d80 so im assuming its on the D40), there's a thing called Auto FP, this should allow you to use faster shutter speeds, but the subject has to be closer as the flash essentially fires off many small flashes to accomodate the shutter speed you chose. I read it on strobist.com's blog, but cant remember where exactly. Must've been in their Lighting 101 section.

I havent tried this yet, as am waiting for my SB-800 to arrive at the end of the month from a friend who's bringing one over for me, but I suggest you take a look at strobist.com's lighting 101 blog.

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yeah alex you can go into highspeed sync flash some how and it does what Gregory said but the flash has to be super close because the light diminishes super quickly

david tejada just made a post about this: http://davidtejada.blogspot.com/2008/05 ... c-cls.html


Jake

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Thanks guys!

I have actually read that light 101 a few months back cannot recall it all but i will take a look into this setting, i wasn't aware of this. Whats really close? Because i could just crank up the ISO to 200 and then i would get about 1.4x as much light sensitivity and drop the power of the flash a few stops.

Because what your take on the current images?

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i dont think the d40/60 has that the FP feature...

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decrease ur Shutter Speed .. And Decrase the Apreature to f4.5 for example ..

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What kind of results do you get in 'Sports' mode? Have you tried it? It would at least be interesting to see the settings the camera uses in that mode. You can take it from there to tweak the settings to achieve the result you want.

I understand you also want to keep the detail in the clouds. This forces you to underexpose, which forces you to use fill-in flash, which forces you to a shutter speed of no less than 1/200.
You can see that the photos have been made with flash light and personally I don't think that particular way of lighting helps the quality of the image here. I would try it without flash if I were you.

Sony has Dynamic Range Optimizer to achieve the effect you want. Does the Nikon D-Lighting in-camera PP option provide something similar? I guess you would underexpose the image and then clear up the foreground with this feature.

Another option could be to use the 'fake-HDR' trick and create three differently exposed images from the RAW data. It has been shown elsewhere on the forum here and is quite effective. I guess it's basically the same as what Sony does with its DRO feature.

Ben