I shot 60gb worth of photos yesterday. That's about 1600 images, and a little video too. Why so much, given that I never shoot with the motor set to continuous mode?
One is that I'm on assignment, and I'm on the job for many hours. The other is that I'm also photographing some dynamic situations that I'm not familiar with. Yesterday it was sailing. I've never shot sailboats before, particularly from a moving boat, with multiple boats in the frame, with good expressions on the faces. Oh, and good light and the right exposure. Of white sails. On dark water.
I had a little bit of learning to plow through.
One can just overshoot this kind of situation to hell and hope against hope something comes through the muddle. Sometimes it's not the worst strategy. I did some of this in this situation, as I figured out what was working and what wasn't. Typically, failure is the fastest route to success, and the more you fail the closer you get. If you're paying attention.
In this case, I had to learn what worked and didn't work and what I liked, and didn't like. Quickly. After a couple rounds of the boats making their course I understood where the best picture likely lay. It took awhile. Looking through the take I can say that I could throw away the first half of the shoot and not miss anything.
I chimped the shots more than I typically do, mostly to nail exposure. With the huge dynamic range and shifting big white objects, auto exposure wasn't going to work, so I hunted for the right manual setting and left it there. Once I was confident with my exposure I mostly left it alone.
I shot 500 exposures to show for the hour we were on the water. And I have a ton of respect now for the photographers who specialize in this subject.
Isn't it wonderful that after years of experience you still get to come across completely new challenges? May it always be so!
Posted by: writerway.com | October 23, 2009 at 12:12 PM