Girl Boxer

Meet Jodie. She's an ultimate anti-stereotype: 14, pretty, blonde, a grammar school girl. Oh, and she has strength and a punch that means her trainer is struggling to find opponents for her in her amateur boxing, as nobody locally wants to fight her in her age group, or above. She's having to go farther afield for bouts because of her ability...

Amateur boxer Jodie, 14.
She has strength and a punch opponents who know of her don't want to face.
Nikon D3, 1/250 sec f5.6, ISO 800, SB900 through shoot-through umbrella,
above and to camera right, triggered in TTL mode by PocketWizard FlexTT5.
Flash was dialled down (I think) by 0.7 EV for this one.

A shoot was set up at the hall where she trains, and the brief was to get a variety of pics of her sparring, using punchbags, relaxing in the ring (?) etc for a feature. The ring was ready on the stage of the village hall, but I'd had a look at the light and decided it wasn't much help - full sunlight streaming through high windows, leaving hot and cold patches of full sun or nowt. We closed as many curtains as would shut and I reached for the Pocket Wizard FlexTTs to light her and her trainer with flash...

More after the break...

Punch! Pad work in the ring, with trainer John Williams.
Nikon D3, 1/250th, f5.6, ISO 800, Nikon SB900 through shoot through umbrella,  placed high and just camera left.
There's not much light where they are, but pools of sunlight in other patches around the ring, so flash was essential.

Here's one where you can see the sunlight that was present much of the time. It's making hot patches on the floor - though they don't burn out at these settings - and wasn't much use for a local newspaper ("Can't see her face"...).

Just for comparison, here's what the ambient light looked like, from an out-take where I'd snapped off 4
frames and beat the flash cycling on the last two. Yes, you can alter aperture, shutter speed and ISO
to lift the subject, but you'll be lifting that background at the same time, probably by THREE
stops and it's really not helpful light. Hence flash being the way to go.  And off-camera flash is
the best way to do that, with a nice wide light source to kick a bit of light around the scene. Even
the ring ropes at the far side are dark in this image.

I also grabbed a light stand and a shoot-through umbrella. The shoot-through costs some power but makes a wider light source, which would be better to see her trainer and some of the ring. One thing I'd try next time is to use the umbrella as a silver reflector - I seem to have got slightly fixated on using it as a shoot through and I think this would help the light output.

I left the Wizards on TTL, figuring that, for the pads shot especially, the flash to subject distance would change too much for manual flash. A couple of D3 test shots established an ISO of 800 for an aperture of f5.6, to help the flash out and give some depth of field to play with, and then 1/250 sec shutter speed killing some of the unhelpful ambient light (which has crept back in because of the ISO) to minimise ghosting. I found that I could get one, occasionally two shots with flash before it had to charge, which meant that timing the shutter press was critical... Luckily the old fool can still do it! What I did see is that the 24-120, being an f4, was perhaps less quick and certain autofocusing in the light there. It wasn't terrible by any means, and I got plenty of in-focus ones, but the 24-70 is better and that's worth noting for future reference

The punchbag pics ended up at much the same settings, and I just moved the brolly around to give an interesting light - this room had white walls so there was also a touch of flash-fill coming back from them. There's an intriguing shot too, where I moved Jodie one bag closer to me, but forgot to move the brolly so it was backlighting her. I initially muttered to myself and moved the umbrella when I noticed but later, on the laptop, realised there was enough fill-in light that these couple of pics actually looked good. Another to file for future reference.

Backlit: In the line of punchbags, Nikon D3 and SB900 on same settings as before, but
the umbrella is now behind her and backlighting her. I'd muttered and moved it
when I first realised, but then saw this on the laptop later. There was sufficient
fill-in that her face read well. Some minimal work was carried out in Aperture, to
lift the shadows a little more. One to file for next time.

There could have been more shots - I later thought of a skipping shot, maybe in one of the patches of sunlight that had previously been unhelpful - but time was pressing and I was happy I'd got enough. Getting home, I worked on the raws in Aperture to recover some highlights, lift or darken the shadows a little, perhaps equalise exposures where the flash output changed on TTL, but these were just minor tweaks - the JPEGs were nearly all quite useable.

Line- In a long line of punchbags, Nikon D3 and SB900, at the same settings (think I had to go +0.7 EV here) but the walls are white in the room so there's a little bit of useful fill-light splashing back when the flash goes off.

I filed 22 images. Their usage in the paper...? Well, that's another story.