Volleyball and strobes

donek

I've been playing with flash a lot this season. There is some good info on the web about strobing a gym for Baskettball, but I haven't seen anything on Volleybal.

The last two seasons, I shot gym sports with prime lenses at f1.6 to f1.8. While this is acceptable for newsprint and wows parents struggling with point and shoots, it leaves a lot of us a little dissapointed.

Adding strobes allows you to shoot with smaller aperatures and greater depth of field. These first shots had the strobes mounted on one side of the court pointed at the opposite corner of the gym. Volleyball has some chalenges as the net tends to cast ugly shadows.




On my second outing, I decided to bounce the flashes off the ceiling. This eliminated the shadows, but required higher ISO and larger aperatures. Not bad if you have a camera capable of it, but you're back to NR in post and needing faster glass.




On my third outting, I added another flash and put them as high as I could reach. I pointed them corner to corner and straigh across the gym rather than bouncing them.


this setup enables me to go with more depth of field/slower glass and reduced the shadows significantly.




breaking the rules and adding some distracting background.


PLease pick them apart as much as you can. Let me know if you have any suggestions for altering the setup.

jonh68

I like the bounced lighting the best. The first couple look more like a bunch of flashes went off.
Good job overall.

portlandpiratesfan

Nice work. It's great when you have the ability to experiment like that! I, also, like the bounced lighting as well, although your setup with 3 strobes gave some nice results as well. Would you mind sharing with us what you use for equipment? Particularly, details about the strobes themselves.

donek

jonh68 wrote:

I like the bounced lighting the best. The first couple look more like a bunch of flashes went off.
Good job overall.

I agree. The bounce flash produces the most natural look. I may try bouncing the three flashes. My goal is to enable me to shoot with my 24-120 lens. I'm hoping to use it for wide shots during basketball season. The sigma 30mm f1.4 I have just doesn't quite get wide enough for me and it's a DX lens, so using it on the D700 generates a crop.

donek

portlandpiratesfan wrote:

Nice work. It's great when you have the ability to experiment like that! I, also, like the bounced lighting as well, although your setup with 3 strobes gave some nice results as well. Would you mind sharing with us what you use for equipment? Particularly, details about the strobes themselves.

I'm using SB-800 flashes set at 1/4 power. The corners are set to 70mm and the center was set to 50mm.

I'm usng cactus triggers (same as the e-bay ones). I had trouble with one of them not firing at a good distance. I bought a second set (transmitter and receiver). I had planned to put the second transmitter on my other camera body. Initial tests indicate that it might be possible to connect the second transmitter to one of the receivers or the sync connection on my camera body and double the transmission distance. Given the low price of these things and this bit of information, I'd recommend buying multiple kits rather than one kit and additional receivers.