The Technical Aspect

Once at the spot, I began to suss out how I was going to make the shot actually work. For this shot I was using my Sony A9 with my 24-70 lens and three Godox tt685 flashes triggered from a wireless remote. I used the 24-70 because there was not enough room in the trail to scoot back further to use a zoom lens, so it was really my only option. The flashes were set up on both the left and right sides to evenly illuminate the rider. I placed the third flash behind the jump to illuminate the dust. I then took some test shots and messed with the power of the flashes, as each one of them needs to be adjusted manually. I was lucky to have Ryan stand in to try and get the exposure set correctly, while also manually focusing the shot.

For those of you who do not shoot photos, the auto-focus feature does not work in extremely dark situations. I set my F-Stop to 7.1 and later dropped it down to 8.0 for these shots. Again, for all the non-photographers out there, the higher the f-stop, the more room there is for focus. A low f-stop such as 1.8 will have a very small window of the image in focus, where as 8.0 has a fairly large amount of the image in focus. The reason for this is that I knew approximately where the action would be, but due to the speed of the riders it would be impossible to get the exact spot that would be necessary with a small f-stop. I set my shutter speed at 1/1000 of a second, which was probably overkill, because I wanted to ensure that every part of the rider was completely crisp and the action was frozen. I did not want any blur from the motion whatsoever and a fast shutter speed would ensure that. I set my ISO at 3200; ISO determines how sensitive your sensor is to incoming light. The higher the ISO, the more chance there is of the image looking grainy. From past shoots with my camera, I felt confident that an ISO in the 3200 to 4000 range would yield a sharp image as long as it was evenly exposed and not overly dark.

We started to run through the picture just as I had planned– one rider to kick up dust and the second rider for the actual picture. After running through it the first time, a few problems immediately became obvious. First, there was not enough dust being kicked up naturally to get the look I was going for. Second, the camera picked up the dust almost like a haze, which went against the image I pictured. Normally, I am not a fan of ‘out maneuvering’ nature, but I was dead-set on making my vision a reality. To remedy this problem, I brought out a bag of baking flour with us, and lugged it all the way up the hill. A photographer by the name of Dan Severson used to shoot in Southern California and on one particular shoot he put flour on the lip of a jump to create a trail effect. That idea stuck in my head somehow and I brought my wife’s flour from the kitchen on the shoot. If it were not for the flour, the image would not have worked. Flour clumps differently and picks up the light far more effectively than natural dirt.