Light positions for night Drags

[Keith Upton]

Hi everyone. Late next week I will be shooting a private drag racing event. The races will go into the night. I will have two AB 800s, an AB 1600 and an AB 400 that I can use to light the cars. My question is, how should I go about placing the flashes? I have three Skyport wireless RX, so distance from the camera should not be an issue.

Thank you for any help,

Keith

[John Jovic]

Flashes usually mean sharply frozen action and that can kind of kill any sense of speed. Ive never shot night drags where I've wanted to completely light everything with flash, although I've shot many hundreds of night drags. I prefer to use flash for a bit of fill and use the ambient light with longer exposures to blur the background as much as possible.

If you are selling the images then no one will care about the artistic merit of the image, just how sharp it is. And even then you'll find that the standards are not usually very high. Get the entire car in the shot, preferably doing something, ie burnout or launch, and the shot will be fine.

The business end with high horsepower cars is usually the launch, if they lift at all. Otherwise you should probably light the area where most cars will be doing burnouts.

You've got lots of lights, maybe enough to light both sides of the track and possibly use different chanels for each, maybe...

Good luck.

JJ

[Keith Upton]

Thanks John. Sounds like it is pretty much the same shooting in the day, just high ISOs and lower shutter speeds. This event is personally owned cars, so nothing huge. You mentioned using different channels and lighting both sides of the track... is that for shooting the near or far lane?

[John Jovic]

You mentioned using different channels and lighting both sides of the track... is that for shooting the near or far lane?

Yep. Pocketwizards, for example, have several chanels so you can set receivers on 2 or more different chanels. You could set a chanel to fire a couple of lights on one lane and the other chanel to fire different lights on the other lane. That way you have both lanes covered. I'm not sure if your gear allows this however. Shooting both lanes is only practical if you can stand between the lanes and then take your pick (and usually only for burnouts because you will be behind the start line). It's generally not practical to do if you are positioned behind the barriers along one lane. In this case there's no point trying to shoot the other lane as well.

JJ

[Keith Upton]

I can do mulit channels, but will have to see where at the track I will be shooting from. I'm thinking I'll be shooting from about the 100' mark from one side.