By John Siskin
I was shooting horses last week; I hope those of you who are horse lovers will forgive me, photographing horses last week. I was working on an article for Photo Techniques and I wanted to make mages that combined strobe and ambient light to create a sense of action and detail at the same time. The idea is that the strobe, which is on for only about 1/1000th of a second will stop the subject and the daylight exposure is much longer it will provide a blur. In order to makes these images, I set my shutter speed at 1/20th of a second. This provided a lot of day light. The problem was that since I had a lot of daylight the aperture needed to be set at about f16 on a cloudy day. If I had been working in the sun my aperture would have been even smaller. Since the aperture affects the light that gets through I needed a lot of strobe. Fortunately I have several Norman 200B strobes. Although these aren’t as powerful as my studio units one of them did the trick. I needed the full 200 watt-seconds and a very shiny reflector to make an impact at f16.
I learned a couple of interesting things when I did this. First these images will work much better later in the day, when there is less daylight. Second make sure the strobe doesn’t annoy the horse. I had forgotten just how big a horse is. And, of course, I reminded myself why it’s good to have powerful strobes.
I like the look of several of the images. They do a good job of giving a sense of motion to the image. Sometimes stopping action is the worst way to convey action!
 Smitty © John H. Siskin All rights reserved |  Carolyn's Horse 2 © John H. Siskin All rights reserved |
 Carolyn's Horse 1 © John H. Siskin All rights reserved |
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