Lens: 85.0mm, 1/200s, f/2.0, ISO: 400
I love this image of Melissa. I took a lot of photos of Melissa with her hair flying around her face while sparring but it was really hard to get her in focus as she moves around so much and is so fast.
During the training I took lots of bursts of images and accumulated over a thousand during the three hours of training with many being out of focus, blurred, rubbish throw aways. Out of that came 150 keepers and then I whittled them down to the best 60 of which the top 4 are featured in this article. You've just got to take tons of images to get the goods when there's so much action happening. I'm excited about the results. Apart from the sparring action, I set my camera to as low an ISO setting that I could get away with to try and maximise the detail and quality. I also took all of these in black and white rather than convert them afterwards to help me learn how to "See" in black and white by checking out the results on the camera LCD screen as I went. Another thing that I did yesterday was set my camera on manual exposure, locking down the ISO, aperture and shutter speed. This allowed me to take some images directly into the bright light from the windows and get a good exposure of their faces at the same time without having to fluff around increasing and decreasing the exposure compensation due to the back lighting. This also created some nice over-exposed accidents when I shot some people when they were close to the windows where the light was a lot brighter.
The weather has been really warm and it got hot in the Dojang with everyone training breaking out in heaps of sweat and some getting quite soaked. There was lots of liquid consumed.
Lens: 21.0mm, 1/200s, f/2.8, ISO: 1000
I took lots of images of Erica and Carolina sparring and this is the most dynamic. The higher ISO setting of 1000 allowed me to increase the shutter speed to 1/200s with my zoom lens which is slower than the f/1.8 prime lens which took the image of Melissa at the top. The higher ISO also makes the image more "gritty" which I like for sparring action.
Lens: 85.0mm, 1/200s, f/1.8, ISO: 400
Steve Pellow and Jeremy Hanna are demonstrating a drill to the rest of the class near the start.
Lens: 85.0mm, 1/200s, f/1.8, ISO: 400
Mark Trotter always looks stunning when he is doing patterns... they are so precise and snappy. Mark was practicing turning 180 degrees in this stance and I captured a few really nice images of him.
I'll feature the 60 images from this training session over the next few days so please come back for more.
