Ty's Out-Of-Synch

Home Run Coming, originally uploaded by Ty Randall.

I call these type photographs "out-of-synch" because they are slightly out of synch with reality. Perhaps for brevity, camera manufacturers have dubbed it "slow synch."

This photograph was done in New Orleans, Louisiana with a Nikon D70 using the built in speedlight flash set to Slow Rear Curtain Synch mode. In this particular image, I wanted to do a shot that would please both the girl's family and myself. That meant a shorter exposure with less camera shake so you could still make out the girl, the bat, and the ball, while still blurring some of it.

In this case it was shot with the very last remaining ambient light left in the day, almost an hour after sunset. I used a 24mm lens with no filter, ISO 200, and exposed for 1/2 second at f/5.6. I watched the pitcher, waited for the ball, and when it got in the frame, I just moved the camera to follow the ball, slightly downward and to the left. You can see the full image on my website.

As with all these type of photographs, I hand-hold them and move the camera during the exposure so it blurs most of the image except for where I point the flash. I do this because it says right in my D70 manual that "use of tripod is recommended to prevent blurring caused by camera shake."

Some photographers might follow that advice, but I'm not one of them. You know that early lesson you learn in photo class or your camera club that says, "first you have to learn the rules before you can break them?" Well, I learned and I break. I actually prefer the overall blurness for my vision. God forbid I get a straight line.

I like how the camera appears to not understand what I'm doing or what it is that I want, so it gives me whatever it can. I love how colors blend when I move the camera so it looks like a painted streak. I move the camera in all different ways and for a variety of times, usually between a half to 4 or 5 seconds, but sometimes longer.

It took a couple tries for this one because the little girl didn't know what I was doing. All she saw was that a flash kept going off and she kept missing the ball. I wanted to get the ball as close to her bat as possible without showing that she missed it. On this shot, she actually connected with the ball so the next shot I took is the one of her running to third base (because she didn't quite know the order to the bases). I'll put that shot at the bottom of this post.

As usual, you can read more details about this on my website at www.TYRANDALL.com.

Girl Runs Through Yard.