Trying out a new technique...

Stanton High school 800m runner A.J. Lozano

As I've said in another post here portraits don't come so easy for me, and sports portraits cause me more stress than most. When I arrived at work today and found out I had to drive 20 miles away for a portrait of a high school track runner I was a little nervous. I brought several flashes with me but only used one on the final shot as it was the only one I could use in a high speed sync mode with my camera. High speed sync was the only way I could keep the subject well exposed and underexpose the background using my shoe mount flashes without significant and unethical post processing (at least it would be unethical to print in the paper). I go the idea for this technique from the Strobist where I have seen a couple of examples. To be honest, I didn't stray much from what I had seen before because what I was going for was simple and pretty straight forward. One light up high and just out of frame on the left and a lower camera angle were all it took to spice up a routine photo. Next time, I would like to use multiple flashes or try this look with multiple subjects, maybe with some very controlled light, like from a snoot or grid, in a wider shot. I'm sure the opportunity will come up because we always need portraits for our player features.
I should note that stobist is one of my favorite sites. It's on a netvibes tab that I check daily with a few other blogs like A Little News. I will probably post a roundup of my favorite sites pretty soon, with these two topping the list.