Bring down the curtain

1 The first curtain

The default for flashes is to fire at the start of an exposure, which is referred to as the first or front curtain. But when using a slow shutter speed, it can appear a bit strange. I took a shot of myself running from one side to the other. The blurry parts overlap the sharp parts and in this image, it appears that I’m actually moving backwards.

2 Set rear curtain sync

To fire the flash at the end of the exposure instead, use rear curtain sync. If you have a compatible wireless trigger, set it on the trigger. Or you can use a hotshoe-mounted Speedlight, then set the off-camera flashes to optical trigger mode so they fire on detecting the Speedlight.

3 Natural motion

When set to rear curtain sync, the flash will fire just before the second curtain closes the shutter (or for electric shutters, just before the sensor readout stops). This results in better definition, a clearer divide between flash and blur, which makes more sense as the blur trails behind my motion.

4 Try colour gels

Try adding colours to your constant lighting to tint the blurry parts of the photo. We used a red gel in front of one of our two LEDS. If you’re using bicolour LEDS, then you can also experiment with different colour temperatures. Here we set it to 2700 Kelvin for a warm tint.

5 Build the lighting

Start by working out an exposure for the constant lights, so leave the flash off to begin with and find a manual exposure that works for you. A good stock setting is shutter speed around 1 sec (or use Bulb), aperture f/8, ISO100. Next turn on the flashes. Don’t touch your exposure settings – tailor the flash power to suit.

6 Use Bulb mode

Bulb Mode can help us time the shot to finish at the perfect moment, as we can simply end the exposure by releasing the shutter. This way we need not worry about timing a one or two second exposure to their movements. I simply held my finger on the shutter, then let go at the apex of his kick.