Action shots

I haven't gotten much practice in shooting moving subjects because most of the time, I'm either taking landscapes or slow-moving subjects. But yesterday, I decided to try out and practice some stop-action shots and some panning shots at the park (the light was ideal for this because it was really quite dark already). What did I learn? I learned that I have to have a great deal more practice.

The stop-action shots of my wife and daughter on the swing required me to time the shutter release just as the swing reached it's peak before moving to the other direction, when the swing would, for a very short moment, seem stationary. This was easier said than done! Out of the almost 10 shots I took, only 2 I deemed to be satisfactory. The rest were blurry and not the images that I intended to capture. Of course, the rather low-light levels didn't help either. I know I could have set my camera to continuous shooting, but I figured that wouldn't help me much in developing my sense of timing.

The panning shots were a rather similar affair. I had never really practised this, and the shots that seemed okay I thought were more chance than skill. So, perhaps more practice in this area is in order.




Festival of Hope

The Christmas concert organised by my church last night was a blast! Here are a few of the pics I took during the concert. The more arty ones were taken during the full-dress rehearsal the night before as I could move around more freely. As expected, light levels were very low and I had to push my camera's ISO much higher than I'm comfortable with (started with ISO 800 but normally worked with ISO 1100). I was probably being over-ambitious but I decided not to use flash and just tried to get my shots sharp.

Of course, all pics went through quite a bit of photoshopping to remove colour-cast, noise, and increase contrast and brightness. A number of the pics are not as sharp as I'd like them to be (due to noise reduction in photoshop, and I suspect, jittery hands due to the slow shutter speed), but I guess I have to live with that. I don't own a 70-200 f/2.8!

Unless of course, someone would generously buy me one...















 
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