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Light streaks at bike races help


james_deboer

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I've been trying to photograph 12-24 hour long mountain bike races

at night. One of my objectives is to photograph a rider approaching

with a long exposure to get the streak from his lights, and then

illuminate him with the flash when he's right in front of me. I want

the light streaks to terminate at the rider so I really don't want

to just hold shutter open and pop the flash as he goes by though. So

what I have tried is this... If it takes a rider 15 seconds to get

to my shooting location from point "x", I set the camera on manual,

my shutter speed at 15 seconds, aperature I really haven't paid much

attention to, and I set my flash at rear curtain so it fires at the

end of the exposure. Flash is set on TTL. When the rider approaches

point "x" I trigger the shutter and hope he's going the same speed

as the guy I timed. Ideally the rider will be fully lit with a nice

streak of light behind him and no light streak coming out the front

of his bike. But for reasons unknown to me, the flash is firing too

late. The streaks are there just as I hoped, but they just end in

the middle of the frame, no rider or a very very underexposed rider

can be seen. I know everything works fine together, I've taken

plenty of perfectly exposed low light pics with this set-up, but

always in one of the auto modes. How do I make this work? I'm

shooting a Nikon N70 with a Sigma flash and Nikon cables. The reason

I'm setting the camera on "manual" is because there usually isn't

enough light to get an exposure reading on, and timing is critical

so the rider is right in front of me when the flash fires. After my

last failed attempt I'm thinking maybe the flash needs to be

on "manual" also and the output adjusted for distance to the rider.

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Hello! Well, honestly your description of what you are doing is kind of confusing (whether or not you have the flash on manual) but I will try. If the camera is on auto, and you are doing a long exposure with rear synch or somthing, the flash will be weak in an attempt to not overexpose the foreground. If it were me, I would try to manually meter the flash at the distance you want the rider exposed (with a hand held meter), hold the shutter open, and then manually flash him as he rides by. Make sure your f-stop and flash are in synch. See if that helps.
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