Archive for the 'Sports' Category

Over the long weekend, I took two very different kinds of stop motion photography. The first was during our annual 4th of July neighborhood block party (I smoked nearly 30lbs of ribs for the potluck dinner). In particular, during the softball game.

I find photos like these to be very much like shooting photos of wildlife, only the subject is much closer and not afraid. Like wildlife photography, using a fast shutter speed is key. I shot most of the softball shots at 1/1000 or 1/1250th of a second. Frankly, I should have shot with a faster shutter speed at f/2.8 to narrow the depth of field and block out the noisy/busy background.

I have found that the focus point selection feature of the camera to be more and more useful. In the case of shooting a batter, I observed that batters typically step into the hit. Thus, if I set the camera to use the left most or center left focus point, I could focus on the batter and take a series of frames with the batter swinging through the frame while remaining in focus (as the batter doesn’t move that much).

Perhaps, the most difficult part was to learn to shoot with my left eye while watching the pitcher with my right eye. That way, I could start the shot sequence right after the pitcher threw the ball.

A faster camera — one that can take more frames per second — would definitely have improved the number of “interesting” shots. With only 3 frames/second, the ball is generally only in frame for 1, maybe 2, frames of the 5 or 6 frame sequence. Of that, whether the ball is anywhere near the bat is entirely coincidental.

Later on that same day, Ben and I played with a bit of high speed photography. Abbie — Ben’s wife — came up with the rather brilliant idea of playing with some party poppers. They worked rather brilliantly, though my focusing skills did not.

Of all the shots, this is the most interesting because the point of focus — the end of the popper — is so close to where the action happens.

This shot could be improved. Notably, going with a tighter aperture such that the depth of field is increased while also reducing light sensitivity would have improved the quality of the photo.

I think.

Not sure.

I guess I’ll have to pick up a few dozen of these party poppers and experiment.

On Tuesday (Oct 26th), we will be going for Korean food at 8pm, followed by bowling* at 9:00 or 9:15pm. A number of people from the O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference will be there, along with an assortment of Apple folks and Subversion developers.

The bowling alley is Homestead lanes. Contact info is 20990 Homestead Rd, Cupertino, CA 95014-0355 (408) 255-5700 Fax (408) 255-5912.

The Korean restaurant is next door. They make an excellent Dol Sot Bi-Bim-Bab (among other things).

I’m going to try to head over to the convention center around 5:30 or 6pm tomorrow evening.

*The non-competitive, quaff a beer or two and have a lot of fun, type of bowling.

Update: Success! We had 32 for dinner, effectively taking over the restaurant (which did a wonderful job of ensuring that we were stuffed). From there, we had 22 bowlers across 5 or so lanes at the bowling alley. It was an absolute blast. Thank you to everyone that showed up. I hope you had as much fun as I did!

I do believe we will have to do this again next year.