Competitive Image Meets a Strobist

I know it doesn’t have the same ring to it as Alien vs. Predator, but the thought of combining endurance sports photography with relatively simple (simple as in elegant, not necessarily easy) off-camera lighting presents interesting opportunities.

It seems that every few weeks I get a call from someone wanting to shoot with me. Some are just starting in sports and want experience; others have the impression that after shooting a few youth soccer games or friends running the marathon, they are ready to move up.

Shortly after returning from China last fall where I was shooting the US Women’s Soccer Team at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup and also shooting the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon five days later, I was still suffering from jetlag, cultural re-entry and needing to pour through thousands of images for Portrait of Passion (a book we produced about the incredible Women on the US Team Portrait of Passion ), I received a call from Kevin Coloton. I put Kevin off – told him to call back in a few weeks. Not only did Kevin call back in a few weeks, but he called back every few weeks. We would talk about his background, his interest and his favorite website Strobist. For those of you who aren’t familiar with off-camera lighting wizard David Hobby – you have to go check it out! Strobist

The good news was that Kevin really sounded like a great guy, everything that I look for in someone who shoots with us. The bad news was, I still didn’t have time to meet with Kevin. Finally in February Kevin got his chance, a trial by fire so to speak, if you consider the conditions at the 2008 Mora Vasaloppet Cross Country Ski Race at 35 below zero, a trial by fire! A good guy, great fun and in spite of the conditions, a great attitude (I was however, nice and warm in Chicago at my mother’s 90th birthday!).

As we got to know each other and sharing ideas, we immediately starting talking about how to best blend our combined interests to creatively resolve some of the issues that I have faced at races.

Two events immediately came to mind. First the ING Georgia Marathon that has a pre-dawn start, and the Medtronic Twin Cities 1 Mile, which has their Championship wave finish just before sunset. To date, the solution we used in 2007 in Georgia was only marginally acceptable (Air Star Helium balloon based movie lighting), and expensive. For the Twin Cities 1 mile, we had not previously even tried finish line shots. As with any shot, you should know when obtaining a good image is only a remote possibility.


Enter Kevin and a ton of new ideas about how to shoot the Twin Cities 1 Mile. We were in the fortunate position that if it didn’t work we would still have the images that we would typically capture of the event. If it did work, well it could make a big splash.

In the following paragraphs, Kevin describes our objectives, his process and the hurdles.

A Flash at the Finish Line – the Stobist Approach to Race Photography!

As Sports Photographers, our objective is to capture images that reflect the excitement, drama and spirit of an event and the athletes, regardless of the situation and in spite of whatever limitations may exist.

But what if the objective is to capture the finish line of a high-profile road race with the following challenges and requirements?

• Competitors finishing in the evening (8:00 PM) with limited ambient light
• Significant shadows cast by surrounding buildings
• World-Class athletes traveling across a finish line at over 20 ft/sec
• Having less than 1 second to capture the “shot”
• One photographer needs to set-up and get the shot independently
• Capture the logo of the race sponsors on the finish line tape
• Create a dramatic finish line image

Welcome to our challenge in shooting the finish line of the Medtronic Twin Cities 1 mile race in downtown Minneapolis on May 8, 2008. We were fortunate to overcome these obstacles and capture the image that resulted in a recent magazine cover.

In the following paragraphs, we will share with you more detail on the specific challenges, the solution we created, a video of the scene and set-up and of course the unexpected problems, and the resulting images.

The Challenge
An important event in the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon race series is the TC 1 Mile race, whose prize purse for a one-mile road race is second only to the Fifth Avenue Mile in NYC. The race has over 2,500 participants, large crowds, outdoor restaurants and bars lending to a carnival-like atmosphere. Competitive Image has been shooting the race since its inception and yet had never attempted a finish line shot due to very low light at the finish line area. As we had done in prior years, one photographer was shooting the leaders of each wave (8 in total) from the back of a Moto. In addition, three other photographers were along the course including one from a roof-top, to capture the runners as well as the spirit of the event.

A key to any good photograph is the quality and quantity of light available, and this was our most significant barrier to getting a finish line photo.

These World-Class athletes were trying to break a 4:00 mile (22 feet / second) and win a $25,000 bonus for doing so.

The speed the runners were traveling gave us less than 1 second of time to capture the image before the runners crossed the line, so there was no margin for error.

Lighting Considerations
We spent several weeks evaluating our options for addressing our lack of ambient light at the finish line. Our evaluation of potential lighting solutions included a number of options including:

• Use a high ISO setting on my Nikon D3
• On-Camera Hot Shoe Flash
• Light Balloons
• Studio Strobes
• Off-Camera Hot Shoe Flash

Using the high ISO capabilities of a Nikon D3 or Canon Mark III would allow us to capture the shot, but we would have difficulty separating the subject from the background due to the consistent (and limited) flat light.

The on-camera hot shoe flash was a solid workhorse option, but would create direct (and unflattering) light on the subject and would not provide us with effective recycling times to capture multiple shots of the finisher.

The light balloons are awesome for lighting a finish area, but are very expensive and light an area uniformly, which is limiting for separating the subject (in our case the lead runner) from the background. This would likely still require some off-camera strobe.

Studio strobes are a high quality lighting option, but barriers to this option include extensive set-up, and require external power sources.

Lastly, and our selected option, was the use of Off-Camera Hot Shoe flashes.

Set-Up
We are big fans of the Strobist, David Hobby. David, the Wizard of off-camera lighting has built an impressive community of devotees. The Strobist approach to lighting allowed us to set-up low profile, self-contained hot shoe flashes triggered remotely. His blog has awesome information on how to light everything off-camera with impressive results. Check out Strobist if you have a chance.

To capture this image, we set up 4 off-camera flashes arranged in a rectangle pattern around the finish line and were triggered wirelessly from my camera to create a “zone of light” around the lead finisher.


The flashes were placed on Bogen Nano Lightstands and were stabilized with sand bags to prevent them being knocked over. We also “zip-tied” the lighstands to the metal gates placed at the finish line to prevent them from “walking” during the event.

This lighting technique separates the runner from the background and focuses the attention of the viewer on the winner of the race celebrating as they cross the finish line. Take a look at a short video of the set-up we used for the race.



Off-Camera Flash Settings
To ensure we had more than 1 shot at the finish, we set all of the four flash units at 1/16th manual power, which greatly reduces the recycle time and provides us with the opportunity to capture several images in the 1 second that the competitor is within the “zone of light”. A key challenge is the delicate balance of having enough flash power to enhance the declining ambient light of the evening, while still allowing us fast recycling times. To address this challenge, we positioned the 2 front “key lights” at exactly 5 feet behind the actual finish line, aimed at 45 degree angles towards the center of the finish line. The 2 rim lights (also at 1/16th power) were positioned 10 feet in front of the finish line (see diagram below) and were also positioned at 45 degree angles directed toward the center of the finish line. Often rim lights require a lower manual power setting than your key lights to effectively separate the subject from the background but not blow out your highlights. Flash power can be controlled in a variety of ways including intensity (flash power setting) or distance. In our case doubling the distance from the finish line (10ft vs 5ft for the key lights) reduced the power output on our subject to an acceptable level. Having the rim lights 10ft in front of the finish line also gave us almost a second to capture the competitor as the enter the zone as compared to 5ft in front of the line would only give us ½ a second to capture the image.

In regards to the flash zoom setting, we used trial and error in setting up the flashes and decided upon the 35mm settings on all of the flashes to cover the finish line area in light. The 5ft key lights and 10ft rim light distance allowed us to capture the finisher, separate the finisher from the background, and not blow out the highlights. For this race we used 2 Nikon SB-800’s and 2 Canon 580 flashes. We used the SB-800s as the Rim Lights and the Canon Flashes as the Key light. We used these high capacity flashes due to their faster recycling time. There is no strategy to using a mixture of Nikon and Canon flashes, and the only reason we used 2 Canon’s and 2 Nikons is that half of our team shoots Canon and the other half shoots Nikon and we had these flashes on-hand.

Remote Flash Triggering
We triggered the flashes with 4 Pocket Wizard MultiMax units (1 receiver per flash) and 1 on-camera MultiMax trigger. We use MultiMax’s due to the higher number of available channels, which prevents interference from other photographers using PocketWizards at the race.

Camera Settings
I used a Nikon D3 with a Nikkor 70-200mm, f2.8 lens to take the finish line shot. I set my camera to manual mode the maximum synch speed of 1/250th (which was too slow, more on that later), and my aperture to f8 at an ISO of 400. I shot the images in a RAW +.JPG setting to have both a quick delivery of the images to our client, and the RAW files for post-processing. A Nikon D3 has the ability to fire at 9fps (or 11 fps in crop mode), but this far exceeded our flash recycling time. To address this, we set the D3 to fire at a maximum of 7fps, which we had previously tested.

Shot Approach
My approach was to stand approximately 20 feet back from the finish line and I stood in the center of the finish area. This position allowed me to track the athlete head on, be positioned to capture the race sponsor logos on the finish line tape, and being well behind the finish line prevented me from being run over by the finishers. In practice, we were able to obtain 5-7 shots per second with the flashes set at 1/16th power. That said, we had frequent misfires due to recycling time, but we were able to capture a few quality images in each burst. Due to the lighting zone being 10ft x 5ft around the finish line, I would depress the shutter when the finisher crossed between the first two lights, and would finish the burst just after they crossed the line. With their rate of speed and the relatively small size of the lighting zone, I had about 1 second to capture the lead runner. Fortunately, we had 7 heats of races leading up the Men’s elite race to practice and fine-tune the flash positions and settings.


Unexpected Challenges
I encountered a number of surprising challenges in shooting the race.

1. The first was a dead flash… Our key light at camera left died during the first heat of the race. The LCD was completely dead, and the flash would not respond to resets or a change of batteries. This left us with a single key light at camera right to shoot the rest of the event as we had no spare flashes available. This added an element of interest to the unidirectional key light, but adversely impacted any finishers running down the opposite side of the finish line.

2. The second was the spectator and volunteer positions during the race. On several occasions, spectators and volunteers would be unknowingly standing directly in from of one of the flashes, which would obviously impact the quality of light in the finish line area.

3. During the course of the event the volunteers and sponsors holding the finish line tape would regularly back away from the finish line. The migration farther and farther back from the actual finish line presented us with a challenge in lighting the finish line tape (and the sponsor logos). Despite our best negotiation attempts, the finish line tape remained significantly behind the finish line and not in the lighting zone.

4. Free falling ambient light. The flash settings and camera settings functioned very well for the first six heats, and then the ambient light began to drop rapidly. In retrospect, I should have bumped my ISO up to 800, but I only had a couple of minutes before the finishers would be crossing the line, and I didn’t want to miss the shot. The decreasing light made auto focusing more difficult, and the resulting image out of the camera was a little dark, but a simple fill light adjustment of the RAW file in Adobe Lightroom greatly enhanced the image.

5. The maximum synch speed of Pocket Wizards is too slow for shooting the finish line. Due to the speed the competitors were entering the finish line area, and the up-and-down motion of the finishers created a slight blur in a few of our images. In sports it is often required to have a shutter speed of at least 1/500th to create sharp images. Our hope is the new RadioPoppers with the ability to sync significantly higher will be the solution to this challenge in the future.

The Result
Below is the final shot selected for the cover of the July 2008 issue of Midwest Events Sports and Fitness Magazine. The post processing was a slight crop and a fill light adjustment in Lightroom. Other than those two minor tweaks, the shot is like it was right out of the camera. We learned a great deal from applying off-camera lighting to a race situation. We look forward to further exploring the capabilities of off-camera flash in live race situations.


We still have work to do, but the results are promising!

In addition to Kevin and me, images of Matt Moses, Kerry Yndestad and Phil Bowen are included in this post!