On Location: Sports Photography Track and Field

Step Three

To solve the flat-light problem, I set up an Elinchrom 27″ square softbox. Since the Quadra heads are smaller than the Ranger heads, I used an adapter to attach the box to the head. The Quadras can use almost all the Elinchrom softboxes except the largest ones, such as the 74″ Octabank. This softbox was placed slightly right of the model, about 3′ away. The power was set to 303 W, adjusted via the Skyport attached to my camera.

The next question was what lighting ratio between the daylight exposure and my flash exposure would look good? I decided to underexpose the daylight aroundone stop; not too moody, but dark enough to make the model jump off the canvas when illuminated by flash. Darkening the background creates separation between the model and background, and subdues competing background elements. Using the softbox did a terrific job of creating healthy skins tones on Annelise, but this light was just the beginning.

Tom Bol