christine anne photography: Lights, Camera, Action!

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Lights, Camera, Action!

Sports photography is definitely not my thing. But I needed some shots for my photog class, so the guys and I drove over to an open field, set up their dad's sawhorses, and jumped away. They jumped, I shot.

First, I tried to demonstrate the concept of motion blur. Not camera shake. :)

I used my tripod, since I was already shooting in the low light of evening. I lowered the shutter speed and closed down the aperture to f8 so the jumping guys would be blurred as they flew by. To set the focus, I had one of the guys stand about where they would be jumping. I focused on him, then clicked the lens to "MF" (manual focus) so the auto focus wouldn't change the setting.

Once I had things all set, I hollered for a guy to run and jump. Using my remote shutter release, I clicked away on continuous shoot. Trust me, I deleted about 95% of the shots I took, due to the fact that I started shooting before they were even in the frame. Plus, I wanted them in the correct portion of the frame, at the right height, etc. Here are a few of the ones I kept.

I wasn't too thrilled with those motion blur shots. Again, I'm not a sports photographer! I like the freeze-frame shot much better, so I set up for that. In order to have a crisp image with frozen motion, the shutter speed has to be pretty fast. I chose a low f-number (about f2.5) and set the ISO to about 500. These settings put my shutter speed at 1/1250 second, perfect for freezing the action. Here are a few of my favorite freeze-frame shots.

I cropped the below image slightly for sharing in my photog class. I wanted Thomas to appear to be jumping through the sky without a reference point for landing. The viewer is left to wonder how high off the ground he is, where he took off from, and where he's going to land. I like his expression, too.

While we were shooting freeze-frame shots, Joseph told us to look over at the street's edge. A guy had pulled his car over and was taking our picture through the passenger window with his smart phone! Maybe he thought I was a reporter on assignment or something! It was pretty funny.

After all that jumping, the guys were hungry. Since we were working in a vacant field across the street from our favorite frozen custard joint, we pulled the car over to their parking lot and got some treats. Mmm!