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My recent project Hypersync Surfing went live on Elinchrom.com last week. For this project Elinchrom and PocketWizard were kind enough to ship out quite a bit of gear, which allowed me to experiment more with Hypersync techniques and make the above image a reality. The above image was lit from 500-feet away, which is a first for a surfing shot. When I posted a link to the Elinchrom article on Facebook, I found out that in the 1940’s the US military devised a strobe that could light the ground from 10,000 feet. Hence, while lighting up a surfer from 500-feet away using strobes isn’t a unique brand new type of photographic image, doing so with off-the-shelf gear and a much, much smaller budget than the US military used back in the day is pretty amazing to think about, at least in terms of what is possible these days using Hypersync. For the full story on this project head on over to the Elinchrom blog, which has a full article, behind the scenes images and a behind the scenes video.
My thanks to Brian Bielmann, Ben Reed and Robin Dabney for all their help on this project – and especially to Ben Reed for the behind the scenes video. Look for an in-depth article on this shoot in the next issue of the Michael Clark Photography Newsletter.
This is awesome.
I was wondering a few things though, is there a reason why you went with the “normal” sports reflector? I would have thought with needing to throw light so far the Maxi-Spot would have been the trick, I have found it to throw light much further and is much more efficient at throwing the light then the regular sports reflector, I just don’t use mine quite so often because for me its surprisingly large and therefore very awkward to transport around, especially internationally. Was it a transport issue that you didn’t use that option? or was it due to the narrow beamed-ness of the maxispot that would maybe not give you enough lit area to work in with a moving surfer?
David – Hello. That is a very good question. I haven’t used the Maxi-Spot reflectors from Elinchrom. So, it wasn’t a matter of not wanting to use them, it was just a matter of having the “high-performance” reflectors and choosing those from experience with them. It might have worked better with the maxi-spot reflectors. I will have to keep those in mind the next time I want to throw light a really long ways.