9/52 - Tennis

Tennis

With December coming to an end and the Australian open kicking off early next year, I figured I'd shoot something Tennis related. I had seen a similar photograph taken by David Hobby a while ago and had been waiting for an opportunity to try the lighting technique he used. This is the result.

Read on for lighting info and setup shots.

Tennis - The lighting setup

The photograph above was a single exposure lit by two strobes. A snooted Canon 430 EX II was fired at 1/64th through a 1/2 CTO gel to light up the ball. The light was bounced using a white foam-core board and a white A4 sheet from below the ball to light up the shadow areas.

A Canon 580 EX II was fired at 1/32 through a green gel at a black background (I didn't have a black foam-core board so I just "dressed" a white board in a black t-shirt).

The total exposure time was 6 seconds. The in-built wireless flash control on the 7D was used to fire the Canon 430 EX II. As soon as the Canon 430 EX II fired, I zoomed in a bit and manually fired the Canon 580 EX II with a cactus trigger. I then zoomed in again and triggered the 580 EX to create a ring around the ball. I repeated the process to create each of the rings around the ball.

The only post processing I did was cloning out the bottle which I had placed the ball on.