Showing posts with label D5000. Show all posts
Showing posts with label D5000. Show all posts

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Shooting BJJ and sports in general...

I had the privledge of working with Simi Valley Jiu Jitsu, a part of Watts MMA and Fitness.  I shot their kids BJJ class, a little bit of their muay Thai class and their older kids BJJ.  I also had the chance to use video on the D5000...Not bad...Not bad at all...

Anyways, the shoot I found to be challenging because I didn't have the use of any flash or additional light.  I had a ton of fluorescent lights.  To be able to have a decent shutter speed, I had to crank the ISO to the highest setting.  I tried to use the fastest shutter speed I could considering I was shooting a lot of intricate movement.  Also, the amount of background activity led to a lot of creative cropping.  Multiple classes going on at once, parents looming in the background and me not having a bigger telephoto zoom lens, it was a great learning experience for shooting similar events. 

I think a lot of the shots came out okay, but I think they only came out okay with heavy use of Lightroom. Ehhh...I shouldn't say "heavy"...Some shots barely needed to be touched, but I'd always find something wrong.  I would get great shots technically, but then wouldn't use the picture because I didn't get something usable.  Or I would get shots that were only great after the editing. 

I went to Hooper Camera to look up lighting rigs for the portrait studio and then hot shoe flashes for the camera.  Not a bad place, but just a bit out of my price point at the moment...A few more gigs will hopefully get me a better zoom lens, then a better hot shoe flash.

I'm getting a lot of mentoring from a couple friends that are already shooting professionally.  I just want to take some time to say "Thanks"...

On to the next one!






Thursday, January 6, 2011

New camera gets a spin.

The wife sprung for a Nikon D5000 for Christmas. 


I decided to take it for a spin at a New Year's Eve party with my family.  I often found it hard not to pose people after they decided to become "unnatural" once they realized that a camera was pointed at them.  I think that I will have to resort to sneaky paparazzi/ninja tactics with super zoom lenses on quiet mode to really capture people in their candid elements. 

I did have an issue with the NEF format not being able to be utilized with most printshop sites, but then again, it shouldn't make too much of a difference.  Pictage and Zenfolio seem like such nice sites, but can I really trust them to make great prints off of JPEGS?  I guess I have to just switch to huge, fine JPEGs with Pictage and convert to TIFF for Zenfolio if I make the switch. 

Here's a few of the family...


Isabella



Liam

Tin

Dylan

Video games didn't skip a generation in this family...
Love that smile!


 

I can't tell you how many cameras were present...
 

Should probably get some sleep



Dancing gets tiring


Classic...
Of the 300+ pictures I took in the span of 2 hours, I can already see where my rig will have to expand...

On to the next one!