Night Bicycle Riding

On a whim we went out to the DNR tonight to do some night shots of bike riding! At the end of last summer Victor and I tried this, but we kinda failed and it didn't work out so well. But tonight we prevailed with the help of Maclin and Cody! aka voice activated light stands...

So I suppose I'll just walk through my process of setting up and shooting.

1. Get the gear you need out. In this case, I planned to use strobes to light up everything and freeze Victor as he was going down the trail. I would have my shutter open the whole time to get a nice light trail of his head lamp down the trail. This plan demanded two things, that I have strobes of course, and that they be fired at a different time than when I opened the shutter. Considering this, I pulled out my trigger that I can fire with the test button on the trigger. I set one strobe to manual with the receiver, and the other to slave so that it would "see" the first strobe pop and fire at the same time. 

2. Compose and focus. I used Live View for this, and just used my Maglite to get enough light to the camera. Pretty simple.

3. Gel the strobes and place them. I chose a orange gel for the strobe Cody would hold in the upper right to backlight Victor. Maclin got two gels (one to cover the top and one to cover the bottom) of orange and green, and he would be just to the left of the frame providing most of the key light. 

4. Test. Just have Victor go a few times and do your best to pop the strobes at the right time. Luckily, when they did fire, I got the right time so we only had to do it a few times! Yay!

Editing.

Shadows up. Blacks up. Highlights down. Whites down. Clarity up. 

Tone curve. Red shadows down, green mids down, blue shadows up.  

This made a flattened yet very punchy look with lots of great color in it. The shadows are cool which meshes nicely with the orange light from Cody's strobe. 

Then add some sharpening and noise reduction. Also a bit of vignette.

See you tomorrow! More biking pictures!