I watched Lee skate for the first time last night. Kid can skate. He must have been royally stoked to head to Barcelona for his 24 Hours shoot and capture epic shots of Harley Miller doing his thing. For someone who tried feebly to stay balanced on a tiny little board, I can see that to capture the shots Lee did with Harley, you must need to know a bit about skating. To be able to interpret and know how the tricks work, and where the skater is going to end up feels incredibly important. So here, Lee gives you his thoughts on capturing a fast moving skateboarder grinding along Barcelona's cityscape.

- Canon 5D Mk II

- Canon EF 70-200mm f2.8 L IS II USM Lens

- Canon 600EX-RT & 480EX Mk II Speedlites

- Pocket Wizard Mini TT1

- 2 x Pocket Wizard Flex TT5

- Photoshop CS6

- Harley Miller from Milk Skateboards

F/3.2

1/1600Sec

ISO 500

Normally if I'm after a sharp shot of a skateboarder doing a trick I wouldn't shoot below 1/500Sec without flash. With flash I use the fastest flash duration possible and shoot with my camera's maximum sync speed of 1/200Sec.

With this image in particular I was using flash, but looking at my shutter speed setting of 1/1600, it might seem strange that my camera let me shoot above the normal cut off point of 1/200. Let me explain...

With a few new bits of kit I now have no restrictions with sync speed and can shoot with flash all the way up to 1/8000Sec thanks to Pocket Wizards controlling my Canon Speedlites. This has completely changed how I shoot skateboarding.

A receiver (Pocket Wizard Flex TT5) on each of my Canon Speedlites and a trigger (Pocket Wizard Mini TT1) on my camera is I need to shoot with Hypersync - which means no more horrible black bars above 1/200!

I'm not going to go into exactly how they work because there's a lot of information online, but if you're thinking about working with Pocket Wizards make sure you know how they work inside out, because they can be a bugger to set up.

For this image I was shooting with an aperture of F3.2 to get a fairly shallow depth of field, but not so much that it's impossible to focus on Harley. I wouldn't normally shoot below F3.2 unless I had to, to make sure my subject is nice and sharp.

Pre-focus the shot! It's really difficult to use auto focus when photographing a fast moving subject. Make sure you know exactly where the trick is going to happen and what part of it you think would work best for the photograph. Here I was looking to freeze the trick nearly at the end of the ledge, but making sure I didn't miss the shot by shooting too late.

Here's an alternative angle for this trick. I was really happy with this photograph, but wanted to talk through why I think the composition of the other image works better.

My main problem with the angle here is that Harley gets a bit lost in what's going on behind him in the frame. In terms of the background, the buildings sit really nicely, but the harsh yellow highlights are a bit of a distraction, as is the horrible lift on the left with the sign above. Finally you also can't see exactly where Harley is going to land the trick, which is generally a good idea for skateboarding shots.

Distractions are definitely something to try and eliminate when photographing skateboarding. In most cases, the main focus of the shot will be skateboarder, so I try to ensure that they are placed against a backdrop that frames him/her nicely. This is why the chosen image works so much better.

I was using two Canon Speedlites mixed with ambient afternoon sun.

- Including where the skater has come from.

- Including where the skater will land.

- Show interesting parts of the surroundings.

- Think about framing the skater and what's behind them in frame.

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I know we were stoked at Gather.ly with the results from Lee's 24 Hours in Barcelona. You can read the full round up of his trip over here. Thanks for sharing Lee!