Trip The Light Fantastic

My back deck was bathed in gentle shadows late this afternoon when I found a firehose of light being splashed on one spot.

One of my hobbies other than photography is cooking, but especially BBQ (See the little green guy over there to the right in my side bar? That's my food blog.) For 25 hours straight this rainy weekend I was smoking chicken and pork so the deck was a wreck! I was cleaning it up, taking down my EZ-Up cover when the brilliant beam of sunlight reflected off my neighbor's window like the ending scene from Raiders of The Lost Ark.

I chased it as it moved from my pile of thin sliced hickory.....

To the batch of bok choy Alexis is growing....

Then I went out front and chased Trevor around the maple tree....

He's my favorite model....

But I have a technical question about lighting for all you photographers out there. Here are two action shots I tried to take of Trev the past two afternoons.

Yesterday with an external flash (SB-600) to light up the shadows on the front side of Trevor. I could have started to work on the exposure but since I'm firing a D-60 with a maximum shutter sync speed of 1/200th of a second I won't be able to stop the blur while using a flash.

So today I tried just using no flash and a shutter speed of 1/320th. The blur is better but the lighting is not good. I need a light source from the front.

So what do you think? Is it just an issue of my camera being too slow of a sync speed? Or is there something else I could try?

I am so bummed.....

I was playing around with my camera shooting Trevor in the early afternoon sunlight when he mentioned that the chain had come off of his electric scooter and wedged in the wheel earlier during the day.

So we walked into the garage so I could fix his ride. I set my camera onto of the large trash can and got to work. A minute later, the thing fell off of the can, plummeting 3 feet to the concrete floor. No one was even near it. Seeing it on the ground made me feel sick.

It did turn back on, the lens isn't damaged but the body did crack at the hot shoe and built in flash.
So it is off to Nikon for repair for a few weeks and I am left cameraless in the mean time :( :( :( I had definite plans for some specific shoots in the next few weeks plus class is starting back soon. Ugh! Sick sick sick.

I have a point and shoot, but what fun is that? Last shot in the Nikon was this one. I was trying to get him to turn his head a little more to his left to get short side lighting.

Alexis, the most excellent wife that she is, tried to make me feel better by saying, "Maybe we should just get you a new camera body."

Anyone got a D-200 for sale?