I've been shooting these competitions for some five or six years now, first with a DSLR which wasn't really suited to indoor sports work but with which I made do for most of the time. The results were good but not terribly convincing in my view, even though the participants and family members were enthusiastic about the photos I'd produced. If anything, I just liked the idea of trying to capture the essence of a particularly aesthetic sport in images, learning about how I could translate my own perceptions of the sport into a form of art which everybody could enjoy.
The first competitions last year were held just after I'd bought a new and technically more advanced camera. It was a steep learning curve for me, a lot of new functions and possibilities needed to be tried out, there were issues of composition and positioning which, although I'd practiced fairly intensively during years past, needed refining and improving. January's competitions were difficult for me, I made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot more and in all I was quite happy with the results. Even though I look back now, after a year, and occasionally cringe at images which could have been shot or post-processed much more effectively, I know that it was a massive leap forward at the time and that since then I've been able to continue to learn in many and varied ways.
Tomorrow is going to be another chance for improvement for me. The competition is to be held in a hall in which I also shot the National Championships in 2007, so I'm interested in seeing what I'll be seeing when I compare the results with those of five years ago. All in all, a good moment to stop, look and reflect again. Tomorrow I'll be able to show a couple of preliminary images of the match, the rest will be published on my website within a week (hopefully).
Wish me luck, keep well...
0 comments:
Post a Comment