Action Sports Cartel

well. went out to shoot the first handrails of the season yesterday. started looking through everything now and i got motionblur on 1/2 of the pictures from this spot.

i used a ranger as a rimlight at setting 3.8, a 540ez at 1/4power down to light his face and two 540ez at 1/4power from high top to light everything else.

the 540 has a duration of 1/833 at full. so 1/4 should be ok to freeze motion, and have been OK for me in the past.
along with 1/200 F5.6 iso100
but now, anybody got any ideas of what went wrong?

the loose one is sharper. but still has some motionblur
the crop is the one with the worst motionblur.

I have no experience with flash photography, but how bright was the ambient light compared to your 540's at 1/4 power?

If the generator lights were really hot and were pretty close to the rider, would that have an effect on motion blur?

the problem is probably with the duration of your head at a low power.

flashes aren't instantaneous their 'duration' is measured by looking at the amount of time the light is putting out a certain % of the total power. ex: time the strobe is putting out over 80% of the full output (for each specific power setting)
so when you are powered down you have the flash 'duration' which is getting longer, as well as the time after that where the light is putting out a bit of light (not much but the flash tube is still emitting light)

How where you triggering your flashes?

Any chance it was more of a camera shake issue over motion blur?

Do you remember what mm you had your flash heads zoomed?

I have noticed when shooting basketball if I have my flashes at 24mm when the subjects are too far out they can be exposed well but have motion blur. If I zoom the flash to 50mm it throws the light farther in a narrower beam freezing the action.

Balance of light and distance in my experience.

Kelly

I've been having the same problem and so I did a little research and here is a nice little write up which epands on what Reuben was talking about