Not gonna lie, shooting action sports is kind of tough. You have the standard lighting, composition and focus aspects to worry about, but there is much more too it than that. There's the fourth aspect of timing, you really have to develop a skill for anticipating the peak moment of action. Lastly you have to have the right person in the right place at the right time.
Getting all of these aspects right is difficult to say the least. My friend Hippie Josh summed it up perfectly, I believe he said it was like catching a lightning bolt, something prophetic along those lines.
Growing up in Southern California I had the opportunity to witness photo shoots going down in real time. I also lived in my high school darkroom and majored in photography in college. I paid my dues and then some but to be honest my best skills came form trial, error and an unlimited supply of effort. I never really had anywhere to go to learn the art of action sports photography.
My goal is to change that. I'm planning on giving away some knowledge and opening up a community of like minded people helping each other grow. That being said this is my first tutorial blog. I'm going to explain how I took that shot of my friend James roasting the 10 foot deep end of the bowl at the skatepark in McKinney, TX.
First off let's talk about composition. My basic goal for this shot was to get the entire bowl in the shot, with the rider hovering in the middle of it. In order to get the right angle I knew I had to be higher up so my camera was pointing down.
I'm not super tall so I brought a step stool to gain a little elevation. I also put a strap on my camera, something I rarely do, because I felt like there was a slight chance I might drop my camera around 18 feet straight down to concrete.
I brought out my widest lens for this shot, my Tamron SP 15-30mm f2.8. I got this lens used from KEH (a really trustworthy used camera retailer) for around $650 or so. I was on a tight budget when I got it and honestly this thing takes care of business, it's my go-to lens for street and skatepark shoots.
One mistake I made was not bringing a bigger ladder. I really wish I had a 4-8 foot ladder to get higher up and try out some different angles. I made up for that by holding my camera over my head.
To get this right I took some test shots while paying very close attention to where the camera was so I could recreate the positioning. It also helps to go extra wide then crop out the extra later, that way you don't accidentally chop off part of the rider.
Next I'll get into the lighting aspect of this shot. The camera settings were 1/1000, f5.6, ISO 200 at 15mm. I always set these things up and take a shot without my flash on so I can dial in the ambient light (the natural lighting that is there without any flashes firing).
For lighting I used my Godox 600 watt-second flash with a Godox wireless trigger. If you are shooting at night flash power really isn't too important. In the daytime you need more watt-second power to overcome the brightness of the sun basically. In full honesty I didn't record the flash setting for this shot but if I had to guess it was full power, 1/1 manual.
My reason for using the flash in the first place was so I could make the scene a little darker while still getting perfect exposure on the rider. I exposed for the ambient, made the shot a little on the dark side, then added in flash to make the rider pop out of the background.
I used a pretty small reflector to help narrow the beam of light down a bit and it also gave me a little extra brightness.
There you have it - my first photo tutorial. Hope that helped if you're in the same place I used to be. Feel free to hit me up on Instagram @vagabond_photo_co if you have any questions!