Feezing dancers in leaps with studio strobe.

eepto0237

I recently shot two ballet dancers during their leaps. I shot with White lightning units. what I noticed was the body parts in motion ,hair, feet, hands were blurry. So, I took a shot with no flash to make sure ambient wasn't the problem. it wasn't. I then decreased the strobe intensity since, I heard the lower strobe intensity the shorter the duration which means the better freezing action. didn't work. I increased the power. didn't work . it drove me crazy. I called Paul Buff the maker of the lights and what I was told was with this particular light I need to increase the flash power to get more freezing power, however with one of their other units ,the Einstein, it would be the opposite.
I set up my lights and tried increasing power to full power, 250 speed 100 iso f 13 and stood front of the camera waving my arm like a moron and it's still blury, so I decreased the power to the lowest setting and did the same thing. still blurry. it doesn't look like there's any difference from full power or lowest setting. my question is: how the heck to you freeze the action of dancers with studio strobes? I'm totally confused. Again, I checked for ambient before stating. the room was totally black.

ziggy53

Precisely which White Lightning flashes do you have? (The shortest duration varies from flash model to flash model.)

What camera bodies are you using?

Do you have any radio slave sets?

How many speedlights/speedlites do you have? What models?

Do you have any CCD cameras with an electronic shutter and a hotshoe/pc connector? Some advanced digicams can sync flash to their shortest rated speed. For instance, my Minolta DiMage A2 can sync almost any studio strobe to 1/4000th. (However, that does mean that very little of the flash power is available so that the flashes are not very efficient.)

There is also a problem with focal plane shutters and rapid motion at a short shutter speed, but that may not affect this application so much.

BTW, set up a box fan with the front removed as a test target. It's easy to see when you are making progress and a lot easier to use than jumping jacks and such.

eepto0237

the fan Idea is excellent. that'll be a lot easier than running back and forth.
At the shoot: White lightening x3200, Canon 1dx, no speed lights. one x3200 in softbox to camera left , one x3200 accent in a strip to the right of camera and close to the background which was behind the model but out of frame most of the time. I was hard wire connected directly to the pc outlet on the 1dx

for the test I did waving my hand around I used alien bee ring flash with the 32" moon unit camera was shoot through the ring flash. for this test I used canon t3 camera

ziggy53

eepto0237 wrote: »

the fan Idea is excellent. that'll be a lot easier than running back and forth.
At the shoot: White lightening x3200, Canon 1dx, no speed lights. one x3200 in softbox to camera left , one x3200 accent in a strip to the right of camera and close to the background which was behind the model but out of frame most of the time. I was hard wire connected directly to the pc outlet on the 1dx

for the test I did waving my hand around I used alien bee ring flash with the 32" moon unit camera was shoot through the ring flash. for this test I used canon t3 camera

Thanks for the information.

The White Lightning X3200 monolights are rated at t.1 1/300th, meaning that 90 percent of the flash power is expended over 1/300th second. Compounding the problem is that the Canon dRebel T3 is flash synced at 1/200th, so you probably saw some vignetting at 1/250th or possibly some rear-curtain clipping.

I'm afraid that you just have incorrect equipment for flash-based motion-stopping photography.

Your best bet is to rent either the Einstein E640 monolights, which can render t.1 times from 1/588 to 1/13,500 second, or Elinchrom Style RX 300 monolight with a t0.5. time of 1/2850 second or probably around t.1 of 1/1000 at full power.

Like I mentioned previously, if you find a camera with a CCD imager and an electronic shutter (not always mutually inclusive) then you should be able to sync at any available shutter speed using your current flash units. I know that I tested my Minolta DiMage to 1/4000th.

A large bank of old battery-powered compact flash units can also work if they allow manual mode and lower power. You can use either radio or optical slaves and they can sync fairly reliably.

A few people are claiming high-speed shutter success using hacked Canon (mostly) digicams and CHDK:

http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Samples:_High-Speed_Shutter_%26_Flash-Sync

Not sure if that would work with your application, however. For sure you would use optical slaves on the monolights to trigger from the hacked digicam.

jbakerphoto

I say it is totally doable. from the paul c buff website...

Sports Shooting
These relationships are particularly important when shooting in sports arenas where the ratio of ambient to flash is considerable and where stopping action is paramount. Here, the power and flash duration of the flash are important. The flash must overpower the ambient light and the flash duration must be fast enough to stop action. This typically requires a t.5 flash duration of 1/1200 second or faster for good action stopping with as much flashpower as possible. Once again, shutter speeds faster than the camera’s maximum flash sync speed cannot be used to diminish the ambient light contribution or dark bars will result.

In high ambient light, you are still limited to your camera’s sync speed. If, at that speed, you get motion blur with ambient but no flash, that blur will still be present when using flash, regardless of flash duration.


X-Series X800 X-Series X1600(full) X-Series X1600(1/4) X-Series X3200(full) X-Series X3200(1/4) True Wattseconds 330 Ws 660 Ws 165 Ws 1,320 Ws 330 Ws Lumenseconds 14,000 Ls 28,000 Ls 7,000 Ls 56,000 Ls 14,000 Ls Power Variability 6 f-stops
(full to 1/32) 6 f-stops
(full to 1/32) 6 f-stops
(1/4 to 1/128) 6 f-stops
(full to 1/32) 6 f-stops
(1/4 to 1/128) Recycle to 100% 1 second 2 seconds 1/2 second 4 seconds 1 second Flash Duration (t.5) 1/3300 sec. (at full)
1/1650 sec. (at 1/32) 1/1800 sec. (at full)
1/900 sec. (at 1/32) 1/6000 sec. (at 1/4)
1/900 sec. (at full)
1/450 sec. (at 1/32) 1/3300 sec. (at 1/4)
Flash Duration (t.1) 1/1100 sec. (at full)
1/550 sec. (at 1/32) 1/600 sec. (at full)
1/300 sec. (at 1/32) 1/2000 sec. (at 1/4) 1/300 sec. (at full)
1/150 sec. (at 1/32) 1/1100 sec. (at 1/4)

Looks to me like you need to put the x3200 in 1/4 power and 1/200 sec for shutter speed....the flash will do the work for you...

perroneford

Welcome to why I bought Einsteins....

There are three ways to get this done.


1. Make sure the gear you have will get you a flash duration (t.1) that is enough to stop the motion you want. In this case, the hands and feet of a dancer might need over 1/2000 to really freeze.

2. Buy or use gear that will get you what you need. Einsteins are great for this, and there are other good lights for this as was alluded to earlier.

3. Use technology such as the hypersync of Pocketwizards to do the job for you.


I battled #1 for a while with my Alien Bees. Then I opted for solution #2. Later, I added option #3 since that allowed me to use my other 4 strobes (all Alien Bees) in conjunction with the 2 Einsteins.


The White Lightnings simply may not be able to get this done.

zoomer

f-13 fail
f-4 ftw