[In response to various musings on motordrives.]
In his book 'Down Under', Bill Bryson (American travel writer better known in Britain
than in the US) comments on a magazine photographer doing the same thing when taking
pictures of him, although he was sitting still at the time.
I'm beginning to understand why, though. In trying to take pictures of my infant son,
I've discovered that I need to take an awful lot of frames to capture that expression
that he seems to wear all the time when I'm not pointing a lens at him.
In fact, you could argue that informal portraiture is a far better application of the
'motordrive' technique than sport. To generalize, a sports photographer is aiming to
freeze one Key Moment - the athlete at the top of her leap, the ball hitting the bat -
and a motordrive is as likely to give him a moment either side of that Moment as the
Moment itself. The only sure way to get results is through intimate knowledge of both
the sport and the equipment, expert timing and a little luck. (This may be why I'm
not a sports photographer.)
The portrait photographer, on the other hand, has to cope with his subject blinking,
scratching, being distracted, all with no predictable pattern, so a motordrive at
least gives him a reasonable chance of getting what he wants.
Perhaps the Leicaphiles out there have their own views on this - any thoughts?
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