Hello fellow photographers! Im wondering if anyone more experienced in lighting could give me some input on this topic. I have been shooting for 15+ plus years, I have always preferred and enjoyed natural light, I have shot with strobes and speedlights when i was doing more media work and the people i was photographing were still. I have started focusing on children, newborns and family and for the most part i use the natural light in my home studio. I recently had a cakesmash session and right before the the clients arrived the lighting completely changed and the sun was just way too strong and shining in a weird position where i had my set up, so i rolled my roller blind down and pulled out my speedlight and put it in an umbrella, now my issue and inquiry here is, when i shoot with the speedlight my aperture needs to be at 1/160 other wise i get the black bottom bar, the subject is a 1 year old who doesn't stop moving, although i got enough good shots because i over shot, there were so many blurry images where his face wasn't sharp at all. My settings were 1/160, 2.2 and around 200 - 300 iso, my speedlight was on ETTL and on high speed. My question is, how do you get the image sharp shooting 1/160? Especially when the subject is always moving around. Does anyone have any lighting recommendations for photographing children?
Method #1:
Enable HSS on your flash and increase the speed beyond 1/160.
Method #2:
Keep the speed at 1/160. Close the aperture down until you block out most of the ambient light. A test shot without flash may look pretty dim or totally black. The darker, the less motion blur you'll get. Add your flash(es) to light your scene almost exclusively. Flashes fire very rapidly, freezing anything that is registered by the camera sensor. You need strong flashes, because they need to overcome your stopped-down aperture. Also, a single flash may not be enough to light the whole scene in a pleasing way. You probably need multiple of them, and light shapers to go with them.
This is the way. Piping in to add that what's happening is that you're exposing for ambient light at a slow shutter. Because your adjustments for ambient would also normally pick up the subject, you're getting motion blur. Stationary objects stay stationary, moving objects are blurred and also flashed.