I spent the past two weekends as "the official photographer" at a couple of similar events. First, a five day aikido workshop, last weekend was a dance workshop.
On Friday night they had a "dance jam" for the instructors, where the instructors would be dancing, and over the course of the song, people would steal them and dance with them for a while, until the next person stole them. This shot of Heidi Fite is one of my favorites from the weekend: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/5953666612/in/set-72157627229809508 I found myself thinking a lot about goals and techniques of shooting in various contexts. Despite my goal to shoot fewer, better, shots, I often feel that when shooting action I just have to shoot when something might happen, because if I wait until it has happened it's too late to get the shot. I also noticed that I often have so much to pay attention to when taking a photo, I'm pretty much overwhelmed, trying to maintain focus on a moving person in a dark room, keep track of whether my line of sight is clear, whether the camera is level, whether the subjects are in even lighting that any sudden change, sound or motion is interpreted by my finger as "time to press the shutter". Another thing I noticed this weekend is just what an amazing camera the K-5 is. When I got my K-x, I was blown away by it's performance in low light. The above photo of Heidi was shot with the 16-50 at f/2.8 ISO 6400, this shot was taken with the K-x at f/1.8 ISO 3200 http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/5953105529/in/set-72157627229809508 When I'm looking at shots taken by the K-x and disappointed by the level of noise, then I know that I'm spoiled. Incidentally, at the same event, in the same room, two years ago, I tried taking some photos with my nearly new K20, and was so disappointed with the results, even compared with my K100, that I thought my camera was broken, and didn't even bother taking many photos. At one of the after hours dances (that run from midnight to 4AM) a friend was talking to me about my dance photos, and how interesting it was watching my progress, and how much I'd improved. As much as my technique has improved, it's very interesting to note the progress of equipment over the past few years, K100, IR modified Lumix, K20, K-x and K-5. I like to think that my technical skill is a big part of the process, but there is no way that I could get a lot of the shots I took this weekend with a K100. I was shooting in a fairly dark room, with slow (f/2.8) glass, at 1/60 second. Welcome to the twenty-freaking-first century. While I got a lot of shots that I think will make a lot of people happy, and some that can be considered great quality for the conditions, I'm really looking forward to doing some shooting where I'm not compromising the technical quality for the conditions. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
