Reflective Runner | How to

You know when you have an image in your head but you’re not quite sure how to make it happen?

That’s what gets me excited (and a bit scared) as a photographer.

The Concept

I do a lot of my run/fitness photography in natural light. But a lot of the lululemon gear that I shoot has reflectivity built right into the garment for safety reasons.

I’ve used a couple different techniques to capture this reflectivity in a natural way, but have always thought that there is a more creative way of demonstrating it.

The concept for this shoot was to capture the reflectivity as a streak while also capturing the runner in stride.

How I achieved the Reflective Runner

A lot of people have asked me about this photo. Is it a single exposure or a combination of a few? Is it real or is it Photoshopped?

Read on to find out.

The Team

I couldn’t have made this happen without the generous help of these two people:

• Maddie is an amazing triathlete and fellow blogger who was kind enough to be my guinea pig in front of the camera
• Fatima is someone who is passionate about photography, always has a great attitude and is keen to help on shoot

The Gear

To make this photo happen, I needed the following:

• Camera – obviously
• Tripod – to keep things steady during the long exposure
• Flash – to capture Maddie in the perfect stride
• Headlamp – to shine a light on the reflectivity of the garments

The Shot

When doing a shoot like this, you don’t get a lot of winners. Timing is everything and so there’s going to be images where things are off by just enough to make you keep shooting. Once I had this shot, I knew I could stop.

Let’s break down how I achieved the two main components of the shot:

1. The Reflective Streak – This was captured with a combination of a long exposure and having Fatima follow Maddie with the headlamp as she ran into the scene. The waviness of the lines is due to the movement of Maddie’s body as she ran; up and down like a sine wave. Fatima had to change the intensity of the light as Maddie got closer so that I wouldn’t get any ghosting and the reflectivity wasn’t too bright.
   
   TIP: The headlamp must be on the same axis as the camera for the reflectivity to reflect directly back to the lens.
   
   
2. The Runner In Stride – When we first stated, I was working with timed exposures (i.e. 4 seconds exactly). This made getting the right moment extremely difficult because Maddie had to time her running and try to be in the right stride at the right time. After many failed attempts I switched over to bulb mode so that I could be in control of when the flash fired. Instead of counting down, I would just tell Maddie when to start, press and hold the shutter and then release it when she was in the right spot. That’s why the actual exposure for the hero shot was 3.9 and not 4 seconds.
   
   TIP: Use a bulb exposure and rear curtain sync on the flash to have complete control of when the runner is frozen.

Put those things together in a single shot and here’s what I saw on the back of my screen:

Here’s what the reflectivity shot looked light straight out of the camera. 3.9 sec at f/11, ISO 800.

So as you can see, the image is indeed a single exposure. You can also see that I’ve done a number of things in post production to stylize the image and fix some issues, but the streaks are real.

The Post Production

Clearly the shot straight out of camera is not the same as the final image. Here’s the issues and opportunities I saw and edited for first in Lightroom:

• Maddie is too dark
• The lower left corner is too bright
• I see clouds in the background that are interesting but too dark
• The image could use some contrast and clarity

Here’s what the image looked like after my adjustments in Lightroom

Much better.

But there were still some things that I didn’t like and wanted to fix:

• The whole image lacked colour and I thought it could do with a bit of pop. The top that Maddie was wearing also came in pink, so I chose to match that colour.
• The bush on the left is distracting, I wanted to get rid of it so I cropped it out.
• I don’t like that the reflectivity starts from a spot. I wanted it to go out of the frame. Cropping helped solve that as well
• Due to the long exposure and Maddie’s dark run tights, there is some ghosting on her thigh. This is because the lights on the horizon were burning themselves onto the image for the entire 4 seconds. This makes her legs look see-through (ghosting) and so I needed to fix this for them to look real.
  
  TIP: Taking a photo like this requires an area that is very dark and is devoid of other light sources.

These changes are more easily done in Photoshop and were the final touches on the image. Here’s the finished result of the reflective runner image again to compare:

So that’s it. If you have any questions, please comment below.

If you try this technique for yourself, I’d love to see the results. Or if you’d like a similar image for your creative project, please get in touch to discuss.

MK