I was on the way home yesterday evening when I decided to drop by at the Extreme Park in Bukit Kiara (next to Sime Darby Convention Centre near KLGCC). It was drizzling when I arrived. Hence, the only activity that was going on then was a bunch of skateboarders doing their stuffs at a large covered skating court with large ramps and rails.
I’ve never photographed skateboarders before. Hence, I wasn’t too sure what to expect and the various types of “cool” actions to be captured on camera. So the results weren’t too good for this first pass. Hope to have a go at it again in the future.
The above were shot at f/2.8, 1/160 sec @ ISO 400. The ambient wasn’t too great. It would have been better if the spot lights were switched on to throw me some flared rim lights. As it was an indoor skating court, there were too many unwanted distractions in the background; i.e. roof, audience seats, buildings, etc. It would have been great had it been an outdoor area with more bright punchy colours. I used a shoot through umbrella key light to camera left (1/8 power) and an on-axis shoot through (1/32 power) as fill.
As light levels fell, and the skateboarders were winding down, I asked one of them to catch their breath on a graffiti-filled wall. Similar settings were used but I stopped down to f/4.5 for this.
And next came, Fandy, a Chong Wei-lookalike of Bajau-Chinese descent. He gets that remark quite often.
For the final picture above, I increased my key light to 1/4 power and zoomed in at 105mm to spot light his face, and render a quick fall off of light at the background. For added low key effect, I could have pushed the umbrella shaft deeper into the speedlite to reduce surface area and size of light source.