Winter Sports and Flash Photography

Flash Photography  •  Photography Tips  •  Sports Photography

Shooting in bright sunlight can pesent a lot of lighting problems for photographers. One way to overcome the harsh sun is by overpowering it with speedlites. Professional photographer Tyler Stableford takes viewers on a trip up the Snowmass Terrain Park in a snow-covered Colorado to show us his setup as he takes a few action shots of skiers:

Stableford used two different setups for this particular shoot. For the first setup he used six Canon 600EX-RT speedlites, which he connected using a pair of  IDC Triple Threats that were paired to his Canon 5D Mark III with a Canon ST-E3-RT Speedlite Transmitter. All six of the speedlites were set to a 200mm zoom. To get the following image, Stableford set his 5D to ISO 50 and shot at 1/2000 of a second on f/16.

The second setup Stableford employed used the same six Canon speedlites; however, this time around he put them into two different groups. Group A were set to 35mm and shot with a Westcott Silver Parbolic Umbrella. Group B were left at 200mm and used bare bulb. The camera settings were put to ISO 200, shooting 1/250 of a second at f/18, which got Stableford this image:

All in all, not too complicated of a setup and it garnered some pretty good results!