photo-lifestyle.com

Taking Action Photos

This morning I was chatting with a young pharmaceutical student. I asked him if he had any pictures he was particularly fond of and immediately had several file transfers on my desktop. He’s obviously passionate about his photo lifestyle, even though he uses only a small pocket camera.

This one caught my attention. The focus is just the opposite to the action photos you normally find in the sports section of the Sunday paper. Usually we see the athlete in sharp relief, with the background blurred to show you how fast he was moving, but if you think about it, you’ll realize that in real life, it’s actually the athlete and the ball that are doing the moving.
It may not win any prizes as a “good” picture, since the subject is blurred but I think it protrays the intensity and speed of the moment better than a “correct” photo would have.

Here’s what he had to say about the photo:

I’m not a professional photographer, so I don’t think about how to make my photos look good. I think about what’s fun and interesting to me, and what will make my friends laugh, or start chattering about their memories when they see the pictures. I don’t consider angles or balance, I simply say to myself, “Hey, if I take a photo of this, my friends and I will get excited all over again when we see it!”

I don’t like to use a flash, indoors or out. It changes the feeling of the moment. If the lighting has orange tones and is soft and dim and I use a flash, everyone’s faces turn out much whiter than they really are, and the surroundings, and good food people are eating simply disappear. So I just raise the EV value and turn off the flash.

I use the continuous mode on my camera a lot. That’s how I took this shot. I had it set to the highest speed, and must have had 50 pictures of this one kick to choose from.

Thanks to Masayoshi Tokunaga for the photo and advice. I wonder if the ball went in?

Try A Photo Shoot With A Friend

I was driving along with a friend when we both noticed this inviting side road, and started exclaiming about it in unison. She had just gotten a new camera and wanted to try it out, so we made a u-turn, and tumbled out of the car.

I immediately busied myself trying to get a clear shot of some maple leaves against a tree trunk. It wasn’t easy, as the lighting was dim, and the leaves were quite a ways over my head. After a few minutes withonly marginal success, I looked around to see what my friend was doing.

There she was at the entrance to the road doing some sort of ‘oneness dance’ with a curved tree trunk. When I asked what on earth she was doing, she started showing me her pictures. They were really good. I’ve taken a ton of canopy pictures, but hadn’t thought of taking them from so close to the trunk!

I started experimenting with the same technique, and got a whole new look of the forest. You can probably guess that trees are my favorite subject, so I was more than pleased to get this whole new slant on things. Now we all know what a dog sees when he is chasing a squirrel. No wonder they love to do it so much. Oh, and no, this isn’t the same tree my friend was shooting. It’s actually the one with the maple leaves. I know it’s not a great shot as the day was overcast. I’m looking forward to trying this technique on clear day with a deep blue sky. It just goes to show, sometimes two heads are better than one.

Are You Using Your Camera’s Full Potential?

I’ve spent what seems like hundreds of hours pouring over my camera manual and was still having huge issues getting my macro to focus.

Just now I spent a happy half hour at www.dpreview.com and learned more about how to use my camera, and how to overcome it’s specific problems than I had in several hours reading the manual that came with it.

I have a Casio Exilim 7.2. The review I read was for an older model, but I now know which ISO is best for most pictures, what setting for the sharpness, saturation and contrast gives the most professional and tweak-able results, and how to take the clearest possible close-ups with this particular camera. What a relief!

I highly recommend bumping over there and checking to see if your camera has been reviewed. You’ll save yourself hundreds of hours of trial and error.