Trade Secrets: Pastel Carve

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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2006-10-03

Trade Secrets: Pastel Carve
Sean Davey's twilight surfing picture is next in a series of SportsShooter.com features called "Trade Secrets."

By Sean Davey

Photo by Sean Davey

Everything fell into place in the picture of pro surfer Jamie Obrien in Hawaii.

Flash photography was pretty full on in the surf magazines throughout the 80's but got old pretty fast and we didn't really see much of it again till the late 90's when some guys (inspired by skateboard shooters) started using flash with remote triggers like Pocket Wizards and stuff. Then it got real big with people trying all manner of ways to light an image up. I dabbled in bits and pieces but was never really that excited by it, because I've always strived to get something a little different. In fact, that is one of my mottos in work. I don't want to be just another guy shooting the same old thing that everyone else is doing, so if I am on the beach and there are a bunch of other shooters there, I am most likely going to choose an entirely different path.

It could be just a matter of walking down the beach and getting an entirely different style of lighting to them or it could be a matter of shooting 1/30th of a second instead of the norm which is typically anything between 500th to 2000th of a second, depending on who is doing the shooting.

My point; above all else, get a unique shot. With this in mind, I was doing some remote flash photography with my good friend, pro surfer Jamie Obrien and my then assistant Ruben Tejada. The idea was quite simple really. Have Jamie perform a carving turn with my assistant positioned behind the wave to add a very unique piece of lighting.

I'm not a huge fan of using flash to light subjects because it tends to dominate. When I do use flash in more normal circumstances, I usually will make it a complimentary source of light as opposed to the dominant light source. This however was a totally different kettle of fish to deal with. I'd already decided to dispense with the big lens in favor of a much more pulled back look, so I replaced the 300mm with a 70-200mm f2.8 L lens because I wanted to make the beautiful twilight colors an integral part of the shot.

I ended up pulling the zoom right back to 70mm, and purposefully under exposed the twilit part of the shot by about a stop to saturate the colors of the sky. This would also help the strobe to stand out more against the backdrop. As luck would have it, the waves had stopped coming through and we thought it would be another failed shoot, but then towards the end a small wave reared up and Jamie took it, immediately hammering out a nice carve.

Everything fell into place on this one. Ruben was in just the right spot to light just the back of the wave and the Pocket Wizards did their thing. We had been having some minor issues with the water affecting the performance of the Wizards, something, which we've pretty much sorted out now.

For those interested, I didn't retain all the technical details, but here's what I do know:

Canon EOS 1V (film) camera.
Canon 70-200 f2.8 L zoom set at 70mm.
Pocket Wizard Multimax set to transmit mode on top of camera.
Canon 550EX flash with Pocket Wizard Multimax set to receive mode, housed inside Aquatech flash housing.
Approximate settings would have been 1/2 second exposure on AV at f5.6, but set to one stop under for the sky, shot on Velvia 100 slide film.
Absolutely no Photoshop techniques were used on this image. This is how it looked on film.

Aloha.

Sean Davey is a specialist in all types of water photography in, under and around the water. Davey lives in Hawaii.

"Trade Secrets" is a series of educational features where SportsShooter.com members reveal the inside-information about how they were able to create a specific image (or two.) To nominate an image for this feature, please send a message to the SportsShooter.com admin staff here: http://www.sportsshooter.com/contactus.html The SportsShooter.com admin staff reserves the right to accept, or not accept, any nomination.

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Davey's member page