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!


Ozark Turtle Sundae


Treasuring life's moments,
Christine

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1 comment:

  1. Those are some great shots. Looks like you all had a lot of fun.

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