When shooting with flash, and using a slow shutter speed, you can record movement and freeze it at the same time.
The shutter opens and closes for a length of time determined by the shutter speed that has been set. Rear Curtain Sync is when the flash fires at the end of the exposure, or at the rear curtain. In the image above, Betsy is jumping around and is lit by a continuous light to her right, creating that ghost-like motion effect. Then a burst of flash from the left went off just before the shutter closed, so that a portion of the image is in focus.
Betsy held up four golf balls. Jim opened the shutter and Betsy dropped them. They bounced down, back up, suspended for a fraction of a second before coming back down, and then “Flash” to freeze them.
During the pandemic, we have had plenty of time to experiment with this technique, but only had ourselves for models! So we jumped around a lot and made a lot of bad images, but a few came out pretty good. Here is a gallery of some of our experiments.
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