*For more information visit AdoramaTV YT page, and of course you can keep up with David on Instagram and Twitter @DavidBergman. LATEST UPDATE: David opened up new IGTV episodes where you can ask him questions live! find out more at http://www.AskDavidBergman.com
Today we’re going to talk about freezing action with flash. Our favorite New York based photographer David Bergman is going to explain how he makes freeze frames, while shooting his muse of the set – dancer Shari.
David shares: “I’m going to have her jump in the air, and don’t want any blur at all in the image, even though she’s moving pretty quickly, you probably know that you want to use fast shutter speeds, like maybe 1,000th of a second or more, to freeze most action. But when you use flash, your fastest shutter speed is limited by your camera’s sync speed. Which is usually around 200th of a second.”
“That might not seem like it’s fast enough to freeze her in midair. You might be able to use a function called high-speed sync, but let’s put that aside for now. Even without high speed sync, there’s another element at play here, that can really help us out. The flash looks just like an immediate burst of light to our eyes, but the truth is the light is still turning on and off for a period of time, it just happens really fast. The actual amount of time that the light is on is called the flash duration.”
“The good news is that it’s faster than your shutter speed, because the entire duration of the light from on to off, has to happen while your shutter is completely open. So even though my shutter speed is only 200th’s of a second, the amount of time that the flash is on, is really much shorter. The flash duration on this particular strobe the ORLIT RoveLight RT 610, ranges from an 800ths of a second to 8,000th of a second. It even has a special freeze mode, to go all the way to a crazy fast 19,000th of a second. “
“As a general rule the more you turn the power down on your flash, the faster the duration. Now that’s not true with all flashes, so make sure you do the research on your particular unit. But that means that as long as we don’t have any ambient lighting affecting our exposure, the faster flash durations will still freeze our subject. Even at relatively slow shutter speeds. To finish this off, I’m going to add a couple of powered-down lights behind Sherry, to create some separation from the background, and we’ve got ourselves a cool action shot with everything frozen, using only our fast flash duration. “
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