Swimming

Two days of covering a national swimming championship made for a very long photography weekend. Even though it was one of high-volume photoshoots, which I typically enjoy less than more relaxed personal projects, I was able to experiment with various types of shots and settings.

What I did not have a chance to try, due to the pressure to deliver images for press releases, is shooting with super slow shutter speeds to produce motion blur. Typically, I try to freeze the motion, which pretty much guarantees some interesting shots, since the spectators cannon see this level of detail in the swimmers’ facial expressions with the naked eye (or even with telephoto lenses) from the stands. A shutter speed as slow as 1/500 sec can freeze the motion of the swimmers, but capturing the sharp images of the water droplets requires am minimum of 1/800 sec (with a 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens.) Capturing the start of the race, when the athletes jump into the pool, requires even shorter exposure times (as short as 1/1600 sec with a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens at 70 mm.)

Another variation from my typical camera presets was in the autofocus tracking settings on my Canon EOS-1D X. Instead of the “soccer mode”, I  experimented with the “tennis mode”, which ignores the objects that appear between the lens and the subject during tracking. This mode helped with keeping the focus on the athletes’ faces behind the splashes, which tend to confuse the autofocus.