One-light wonder

It's amazing what you can do with one off-camera strobe and a little help from your friends.

The assignment from sports editor Tim Candon was a portrait of Cary High School tennis phenom Justin Radloff. Conveniently enough, uber-portrait-shooter Jeff Camarati (he of the no web page) and I had been discussing just this very type of shot the week before.

Unfortunately, my crutch Jeff wasn't available to do it for me help out, so I headed off to the courts to fend for myself.

Fortunately, Justin is a great guy who was more than willing to get into the shoot after he finished trouncing Tim in a fast game (sorry, no pictures of that -- I promised Tim I wouldn't embarass him). So with a single SB-80 on a stand to camera left, we spent about 20 minutes having Tim throw tennis balls as I convinced Justin to break every rule of good tennis form in pursuit of the perfect picture. And if I do say so myself, I think we did a pretty good job.

For the mechanics, I metered the ambient exposure and underexposed by about two stops to bring the sky and clouds down and make Justin "pop." I'm lying on the ground (one of the top 10 techniques they don't teach you in photo-j school) and pointing a prefocused 15mm at Justin. When I yelled "go," Tim would toss a ball in the air, Justin would jump and I would pull the trigger while praying that he didn't sprain an ankle...

As always, many thanks to David Hobby at Strobist for his invaluable inspiration on off-camera lighting techniques.