Spent a couple of hours with Alex Sheppard this week trying to get some action shots of him mountain biking out at ‘Pipeline’ in Gap Creek Reserve.
Most of the shots here are using a panning technique – slowing the shutter speed down to 1/20 – 1/50 second and allow the camera to follow the rider. This is what gives the streaked background effect.
I was also using some off camera flash to fill in the details as the sun was behind Alex and giving a nice backlight but without flash the side facing the camera would have been in shadow.
Full concentration halfway through the 180 degree berm
Great idea to use the flash for extra light against the bright background, but also to freeze the action and still get some motion blur.
We had lots of fun doing this shoot and that is exactly what I was trying to achieve with the lights.