Ink!

 
Our instructor, Brown, has some serious ink. Today, on a whim,I decided to try and capture some of it.

It happened by accident. He had started his WOD and I was snapping the same old pictures I've been snapping for months now... wall balls, kettlebells, etc. I decided to try something new and shoot him from the neck down. The first one I took was sorta interesting, but out of focus. (I'd been toying with manual focus a lot lately since I find that the auto focus doesn't lock on fast enough in low-light conditions.) I was using my 50mm lens so I put it in aperture priority mode and used a slightly smaller aperture (f/2.4) to give me some more wiggle room in focusing. Then I decided to use some flash, albeit diminished flash (by decreasing the exposure bias) to help fill in the light. I found that this was really tricky and my flash strength had to be adjusted down over the course of the WOD. Why? Because the sweatier somebody gets, the more reflection you get from your flash! Finally, after something like 50 tries, I got a decent full-back shot while he was doing kettlebell swings. Woohoo!

As for post-processing, I played around with it alot. I tweaked the color levels in GIMP (a subject for another day), then sharpened it, cropped it, and B&W filtered it in Picasa. The red filter really works wonders for bringing out tattoos, as I've mentioned before.

Here's another shot I took after many many attempts. I knew I wanted one showing both his calf and his full sleeves at the same time so the Sumo Deadlift High-pulls with the kettlebell were perfect for that. It took me a while before I got everything in focus (more or less), but it was worth it.
 

If you'd like to see the rest of the shots from today's WOD, as well as the color versions of these, go to Chewing Qat II.

Back to basics

 
Our workout today was called "Back to basics" which was appropriate since the shots I took today followed a similar theme, that is, getting back to a basic technique- focus.

A while back I got a suggestion from a reader, bentzurm. He pointed out that many of my photographs were soft and that I might try using a higher ISO if it allowed me to take sharper pictures. Well, today was the first chance I got to give it a shot (no pun intended). I'll admit, I didn't follow bentzurm's suggestions exactly: I was in a rush because I knew Browns' workout wouldn't last long (less than 3 minutes!) and I didn't want to miss any opportunities. So I used the sensitivity mode on my Pentax K10D and set it to 1600 ISO- basically, the highest sensitivity setting for my camera. Unfortunately, I was in such a rush I didn't realize some of the settings were still in place from an earlier shoot I had done over the weekend around a late-night bonfire so many of the shots had very weird exposures to say the least! I was forced to use the flash a few times against my will before I realized what the heck was going on..... Nevertheless, I think the focus was better overall today than in previous WODs, so I'm encouraged.

Like I said, I didn't have much time to set up these shots at all, so the background is cluttered and many of the pictures are spur of the moment snapshots. In an attempt to crop out the most distracting stuff, I cropped it wide and thin, almost like a widescreen perspective. I used the filtered black & white tool (red) to emphasize his tattoos and then brought up the contrast just a tad. Love the facial expression in this one. There's another one with an even better grimace, but the exposure is too dark to make much out of it, I'm afraid. You be the judge- see the rest at Back to Basics.