Parker A Grimes Photography

Little League baseball portraits in the middle of a bright, cloudless, summer day. Just about the worst lighting conditions out there. Add baseball caps to that and you have a pretty crappy lighting situation on your hands. So what can you do? Well, you can expose for the face and blow the background and just about everything else to solid white. You could find some shade, if you’re lucky. You could use some serious studio lights (400+ WS) and shoot at f/16 or more to stay within sync speed. You could use a reflector. Not a bad option, but a different look to be sure. Or you could use high speed sync on your flash. I chose the latter.

I wanted to maintain a very shallow depth of field, like f/2.5. That meant the shutter speed was 1/3200 sec, WAY over the 1/250 sec sync speed on my Nikon. So the solution was to pull out my SB-900 flash and shoot in high speed sync. I positioned the subjects with their back to the sun. Dialed in my exposure for the ambient light (bright sun – f/2.5 at 1/3200 sec). Dialed in +1.3 compensation on the SB-900. Stuck the flash on a stand with a shoot-through umbrella. Triggered TTL with built in pop-up flash on my camera (set to commander mode only). The result is so much nicer than just shooting “available light.” I love having options. High speed sync is a nice option to have when you need it.