Slackline fun in challenging light

Who in the right mind would buy a nylon line to stretch between a couple trees, attempt to balance on it only to faceplant over and over again? Well me! As a matter of fact, I even bought 2 of these wrist-breaking-setups by mistake since my supposedly infallible memory decided to fail on me...again.

Slacklining is actually a great core workout: it tests your balance, provides a cardio workout (if you keep falling and climbing back on at least) and works most muscles in your body. All of that is accomplished while you try not to break a bone….and it’s fun! Details…

Anyhow, it also creates good opportunities for fun pictures as you can see here:

Nameless Scott chicken-winging it on the slackline

I won’t mention the guy’s name out of respect, but his expression and body language are the best example of funny pictures you can produce. Sorry Scott. Oh…

As far as photography technique goes, this was a challenging lighting condition (around 3:30pm on a sunny day). The direction in which you shoot is very important. Shoot straight towards the sun, and your subjects just become those dark silhouettes in front of a bright background. Shoot your subjects in the shade with sunlight background, and you get a similar effect. The latter is more manageable, but you still get a dark subject in front of a bright background:

Gabe balancing on the slackline

The best compromise I found that day was to shoot the subjects in the shade with relatively shaded backgrounds (using the rest of the trees as a background rather than the open field).

Jen getting ready to climb on the slackline

This results in patchy lighting, but that’s what I thought was the best alternative. You can use a flash to fill in the shadows, but I was shooting in burst mode so the flash wouldn’t have been able to keep up.

I shot in burst mode because most of these are action shots:

Gabe about to eat it on the slackline

I won’t hide the fact that I was hoping for people to fall to make good snaps, but (un)fortunately that didn’t happen too much. I shot all of this with a wide angle 24mm lens at 1/500th of a second in shutter priority mode, and auto ISO (set at 100). The camera chose apertures between f/2.8 and f/4.

One mistake I made was to assume that I could just leave the camera on the side for other people to shoot with while I was playing on the slackline. The mistake was in my assumption that everyone there knew how to use my camera, and the fact that I left the camera in 1 spot autofocus mode instead of fully automatic. Therefore, when someone else picked up the camera to shoot, very rarely was the focus point on the subject.  It often ended up on the trees in the back, resulting in a large amount of blurred pictures such as this one of me superman-ing it:

Myself trying to fly away from the slackline

Nevertheless, Scott was able to get a couple good shots, framed nicely and focused appropriately:

Ah now we have a nice shot of the slackline (though I should be out of the frame on the right)

Very nice expression Laura

Bottom line, shooting when the sun is straight up will be more challenging than you think…it can create harsh lighting with very bright and very dark spots. Use your surroundings to compensate the best you can for this, such as darker backgrounds with shade on your subject. Lastly, make sure your camera is set-up for anyone to use if that is ever your intent. Don’t assume that people will understand (without explanation) where the focus point is.

Go out and shoot! Oh, and don't get hurt on those lines, it's easy to not land on your feet!

Guillaume