Al- I'm glad Michael Hall and Paul Gillespie chimed in as they have
offered good advice and links to good advice.
I shoot a ton of sports for a daily newspaper and when I was using
my own equipment before the company started providing equipment I
often would do a quick and dirty multi-flash setup as described
below.
I had two old Nikon SB24's that I didn't use after switching to
Canon. Any manual flash can be used however. I power them via
Underdog batteries and trigger them with Pocket Wizard remotes. I
would shoot them one stop brighter than ambient to allow freezing
of motion and still allow the background to show up. Placement was
either both at left and right corners on one end or one at the near
corner and another at mid-court aimed at the key. This provided
both main light and key light. If it seems that I was getting too
many players or more often an ump that would block one flash I
would then use one flash on camera too as a fill. The flash,
battery, and PW's were mounted to railings, hand rails, whatever
via a SuperClamp. I also screwed a hot shoe mount onto the
Underdog batteries which then permits the flash to sit atop the
battery (I call this a flash grenade setup) allowing me to even
place them quickly on the floor or on a nearby stadium seat, wall,
etc at either corner of a sporting event (floor setup is best for
low stuff like wrestling). I leave them set as flash grenades in a
small Domke F3 bag. After setting it up once or twice you will
know your power settings and required aperature setting. Using
800asa with the flashes at 1/8- 1/4 power I could usually get
1/
[email protected] in the shooting zone of the court. I could setup and be
shooting in about 2 minutes using the flash grenade configuration
or about 10 minutes using clamps and finding a position.
You can replace the small flashes with more powerful Dynalight
Jrn's (which I also sometimes use) for more DOF but the expense is
more too and the setup takes longer. Other good monolights are the
White Lightning Zap's and even the light but sturdy Alien Bee's.
Get the largest watt second unit you can afford and then shoot at a
low power setting to get the shortest possible flash duration.
While I don't use my personal gear for work anymore using the above
setup is something I miss as it made the images that much better.
