Sarah is the IL State High Jump Champ from Springfield High School.  Last night we went out to her mats at the track to grab some shots. When we arrived, there were a couple things to work around:

1) A Freshman football game.  HA!  Not really the best backdrop :)

2) Busy backgrounds of spectators, houses, cars, fences, scoreboards, a bit of everything really.  

I was envisioning Sarah arching over the bar with an open sky sunset in the background.  Under exposing the ambient by a stop or two and bringing in some flash to carve her out of the scene. That wasn't happening folks. Too much in the way of the horizon.  

Considering the ever changing backgrounds of the two points above, I cranked up my Profoto D1's all the way to see what would happen to the ambient.  I kind of chuckled at the result first, but then decided to stick with it.  It being that it totally killed the ambient.  

Thanks to Bryan Throckmorton for shooting some behind the scenes pics and for helping me load / unload a bunch of equipment.  

So, here are some of the setups.  We started shooting around 4:30, so we had a little over an hour of daylight.  Everything is pretty normal: gridded reflectors, gridded strip boxes (outer baffle only to harden it up a bit), etc.  Only thing unconventional was a bed sheet on a 6x6 ft scrim jim frame.  Yep, it's a ghetto way of getting a big light source. Thank Joe McNally.

Sarah does back flips to warm up :)

Was pretty much just metering lights here for her to go over bar, though ended up using one of the shots.

I'm actually in the end zone :)

The bed sheet soft box:

By killing the ambient, I meant killing it...as in black.

The fence barely shows up, but not the fans and houses, so I just kept them at full power.  Might as well experiment...

The bed sheet pic:

Sun was setting behind trees.  Dialed the D1's down to half power to get some sky.  Sara has her eyes set at 6 ft. to clear this spring.  Which means she can jump over me.  Nice.

And a couple shots of her warming up with stretches and backflips.

Thanks to Sarah! I look forward to doing it again...can't believe how fast an hour of shooting goes by, especially when messing with studio strobes the entire time.  Need lighting assistants :)  Next time there's a couple tweaks that will put them up a level.  For the first go around, we'll take it!