Flash unit - highest shutter speed

Mozziephotography

Mozziephotography

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Stephen
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I want to photograph runners at a race which takes place at 7pm next Wednesday and the light will probably be poor The front runners are fast! Can Nikon speedlight units cope with this?
 
Argh! I bought an SB700 on here but sold it on to MPB because it was way to complex to set up for my ancient brain! Never mind.
 
With flash photography you are exposing for 2 light sources, ambient and flash. So if the ambient gives you for example 1/10 at f4 and you choose 1/60 at f8 nothing or very little of the ambient light will be caught by the sensor, so only that which is illuminated by the flash will register. Flash duration is very brief and will "freeze" all but the fastest action, consequently the runners will be illuminated by the flash and will be frozen in time, however the background may be totally black therefore you need to expose for that also, it's a juggling act between the two. You won't need high speed synchronization that I think is used more in bright daylight.
PhilV is your man to ask for extra guidance and confirmation my post is accurate.
 
On a Nikon D7000, flash will sync at any speed up to and including 1/250sec. It can also run to 1/320sec in FP mode or something, but you'll lose a little flash brightness and it may only work with Nikon branded guns (best check that, I'm not a Nikon man).

Above that, you need high-speed sync (Nikon sometimes calls it FP-sync or similar) for which you need a flash gun with HSS capability. HSS also loses a chunk of effective power so a bigger gun is a good investment.
 
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