Sports Photography with Flash

I photograph a number of high school athletic events.  Those held in dimly lit football stadiums or gyms require an added light source unless noise isn’t a big issue.  Even with today’s magnificent low light sensors, noise still becomes an issue by ISO 5000.   With my 400 f4 lens, I would need an ISO of 10000 to take an adequate photo freezing the action at 1/640 sec.  Hence, the need for a flash.  Sports photography with flash poses domes problems, however.   One problem becomes how to freeze the action.  This is more than a function of shutter speed.  The flash sync of a Canon 5D MKIII is 1/200 sec.  This is much too slow to freeze action by itself.  However, the flash duration is much shorter than the shutter.  It typically is somewhere around 1/1000 of a second.  So, the flash should freeze action, right?   Not necessarily.  The more power the flash is outputting (which is a lot to cover a dark high school football field), the longer the duration of the flash.  I have found a somewhat happy medium is to set the flash to manual with a setting of 1/2 power, ISO around 800 to 1250, and of course, my aperture at f4.  This works when the action is close but when the action is farther away, the flash can’t produce enough light at 1/2 power to evenly illuminator the scene.

Canon 600 EX RT

If I raise the power output, the scene becomes blurry.  I had been using a Canon 600 EX RT with a SRT R3 transmitter.

Quantum T5DR

I switched to a Quatum T5DR to see if that would allow for better illumination.  The higher power flash definitely gave me more working range but blur is still somewhat of an issue.  The evenness and depth of illumination is improved, but some blur is still present.  The photo on the left has some ghosting which isn’t a major distraction but is still visible.  The next step may be to find a camera with a faster flash sync and see if that improves the situation.