Whitewater Kayaks in Rapid Fire Mode

#2 - 1/500 - 2:11:19

They say a picture is worth 1000 words.  So this post will have a minimum of words, and enough images to illustrate a point.

I love manual focus.  I use it a lot, and even have a Zeiss 35mm Leica mount lens for my Nex-6 which I use all the time.  Completely manual in every respect.  But there are times when manual focus is just not going to get it done.  One of those times was the recent trip to the US National Whitewater Center.  In a situation like this your subject is moving all the time, often in unpredictable ways.

My setup was to use the Sigma 70-200 EX lens.  I enabled the image stabilization on the lens in Mode 1 (general shake as opposed to pan mode).  I selected continuous shooting, high frame rate on the camera.  Aperture preferred mode was selected.  This means the camera will have continuous phase detect focus on, but will try to maintain correct exposure by adjusting shutter speed between each exposure. 

For this series I shot 27 exposures and have selected 10 to convey the action.  Just to be clear, this is not a single, hold the shutter button down, series.  My shooting style is to continually pan the camera, and blast 1-3 shots, watch the framing, blast 1-3 more, move, blast 1-3 more and so on.  So this is not a test of how many frames can be shot until the buffer fills up. Some groups are only a second apart, but no problems with the speed slowing down.  All frames were at f/4.5 with ISO set to 100.  Each caption has the sequence number along with shutter speed and time stamp.

The cool thing is that all the photographer has to do is keep the subject in the EVF.  With the EVF you never lose sight of the subject.  The camera / lens does the rest.  All these were hand held and I did not use object tracking.  Focal length was 105mm.

#4 - 1/640 - 2:11:17

#9 - 1/500 - 2:11:19

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#19 - 1/400 - 2:11:23

 

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Some minimal processing was done on each frame, really minimal.  No cropping was done.   All frames were saved in best JPG quality.  5 scan progressive with quality set at 12, so they are about 1 mb each even after being reduced down to 1200-800 pixels using bi-cubic sharper in Photoshop. 

I just love shooting like this.