Our town has a Civic Arena with three regulation sized rinks; the local speed skating club sponsored/hosted the US 2017 Age Group National Championships this weekend. Short track, i.e. 500 meter races. We spent a few hours there yesterday. This GESO has a few selections from that shoot. We saw many many heats across 10-12 different classes. Most heats had four racers, some with only three, a few with five. In some heats there was competition for first place, but the top two in a given heat moved on to the next race and so 2nd place was just fine. Often times there was fierce competition for that 2nd spot though. The shots in this set which show two racers most likely are showing the 2nd and 3rd place racers, with the 1st place well out of the picture. Mixed in with the Age Group races were “America’s Cup” races which lead to points awards which count toward national standing and may help skaters garner an invitation to try out with the U.S. Olympic teams. The top five men and women were not present as they were off doing World Cup or some such.
The arena has a smallish bleacher area; I would guess that 99% of the people there were skaters, friends, family, or coaches. I doubt if there was anybody except the two of us who had just come in to see something new. The arena is also used for several amateur hockey leagues and it has all of the requisite protective barriers to ensure spectator safety. I went as high as I could in the bleachers to be able to shoot over the glass barriers but some of that inevitably shows in the foreground on a few shots. Mostly shot at 6400 ISO, f6.7, 1/750 to 1/1000. I did go to 12800 and f/8 for a time in the middle, not sure if any in this set have any from that period. K-1, D FA70-200/2.8, AF-C, spot. I did try the metering mode which auto selects from among 9 sensors clustered on the center spot, couldn’t see that I was getting any improvement. Conclusion - the K-1 works for sports, but I would prefer more light and (as everyone always says) it would be nice to have a deeper faster buffer so as to be able to machine-gun the shots. stan http://photos.stanhalpin.com/p807525670/e85df0577 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
