What I like most about this photo is the lighting- a lot of times when shooting wallrides, the shadows created by flashes are very distracting and unpleasant. The best way to solve this is to put the light exactly perpendicular to the wall so that the shadow does not spread across the wall. Of course this is just a guideline and is not always going to create the best lighting- however in this case it worked like a charm. The addition of the flash from above makes an almost seamless rim light continuous with the flash on the left.
“I shot this photo of Jake Hanczar in State College PA, we were out pedaling around one night about 9:30pm trying to come up with a spot to shoot when I mentioned the curved wall. It has been a wall I’ve always wanted to shoot and not being able to think of an other spots we headed to the wall, Jake had never ridden this wall before but after a couple goes at it he had it unlocked.
It’s kind of a strange location because the wall is located down at basement level to the building it’s connected to, unfortunately for Jake this gave him very little run up for speed. Fortunately for me it allowed me to be above him at ground level to get the angle I wanted. I played around with different lighting a few times before getting it how I wanted. I placed one flash to the left of him in between the wall and the AC unit, the second flash is located right above Jake extended out on a tripod that I connected with a pallet that was laying around to keep the tripod from tipping over and falling off the wall. We were both stoked on how it turned out.
Canon 40D
Canon 50mm 1.8
1/250 @ f/4.0
ISO 500
2 Sunpak PZ42X (flash on the left @ 1/4 power, flash above @ 1/8 power)
2 Vello Freewave Fusion triggers”
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Push It A Stop 