Along the lines of yesterday’s outing at the 2011 Pro-Am Shooting Competition, I wanted to talk a bit about photography. Now, my background in professional photography is from weddings, where there was a dearth of firearms. However, one of the skills I did bring across was the sense of timing. Pictures require a sense of when to take the picture and in the shooting world there’s a quarter second difference between meh and wow! Take these two consecutive pictures
In this shot, Jessie just completed her string of shooting. I was trying to catch the mag drop as she took off but was a bit early on the first shot. The second shot was less than a second later as she was taking off – you can see her magazine hitting the ground. Nothing wrong with the first picture, but the second has much more action in it. The bright, sunny day meant that my shutter speeds were usually between .0004 (1/2500) .0008 (1/1250) seconds. I was using my 70-200 VR lens and kept my aperture to f/5.6 because I wanted the background to blur. The larger opening meant more light so the pictures tended to come out frozen with very little blur – even on the ejecting brass. A neutral density filter might have been a good idea, now that I think about it.
I even got quite a few great shots of the slides still back with the brass just on its way out. This shot was at 1/16000 so there was a *slight* amount of blur, but still a pretty cool shot.
I’m not Yamil Sued or Oleg Volk by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I can hold my own. Gonna look into doing this stuff a bit more often.