Black Headed Gulls Hovering, High Speed Flash Attempt 1

After the first attempt at using flash, which had really not worked out as I had planned due to the flash being too slow, I decided to give it another attempt using faster flash. The problem with using fast or high speed flash is that because it is so fast it does not give of very much light. This meant that I needed a lot of flash heads. In the past I have used flash heads mounted on stands around a specific location to capture birds flying. However this meant that I was limited with where I could take a photograph. For what I was doing at the time this did not matter however for what I wanted to do in this shoot I needed all the flash heads to be mounted on the camera (no easy task with only one hot shoe mount).
After searching on the internet for some kind of bracket that could hold up to 6 flash heads and be mounted on the camera with not much luck I decided to go and see what the uni had for this sort of thing. With a bit of bodging together of 3 way flash head mounts, a clamp and extendable arm we came up with a mount that could be attached to the camera via the tripod mount and hold 6 flash heads. The whole unit was synched via flash slave units so when the flash on the camera fired all the other flash heads were triggered as well.

Image by © Jean-Philippe Offord
The new high speed flash set up made up of 7 flash guns mounted on the camera with a variety of brackets and mounts. All synched via slave units.

I headed down to my location at Swanpool for first light. I had some bread to bate the gulls to fly close. It was dark when I got there with the only sign of movement being the coots and ducks swimming on the lake. As it became lighter I began to get slightly worried that maybe the gulls did not visit the pool this early in the day but instead came later when more people were around with bread. To my relief a few minutes later a flock of gulls came circling round the pool and spotting me with the bread started to head over. Throwing them the bread then hoisting the camera and flash up to photograph them proved to be quite a task. The camera with all the flash guns mounded on it weighed a lot and was a challenge to hold steady. I experimented at first with a fast shutter speed and flash however this looked unnatural with the white gulls standing out against a black background. This led me to lower the shutter speed to around 1/10 to allow for a small amount of ambient light. I then experimented with panning techniques.
Getting the correct exposure proved to be a challenge because the histogram was all over the place as was the exposure meter. I found when reviewing the shots back after the shoot that a lot of them were underexposed. I also found that I had almost a strobe light effect in some of the images. The only explanation that I can come to is not all the flash heads were going off at the same time. In some cases this strobe effect worked however it was not what I was really looking for. All in the shoot went really well and I am pretty happy with the results. There are a few things that I think I will change for next time; I think that if I turn the flash on the camera towards the flash rig it will trigger all of the flash heads to go off at the same time this will get rid of the strobe effect. I would also quite like to experiment with second curtain flash.