Robbie and Iaido - the art of the Samurai Sword

July 08, 2015 in Portrait

Last sunday was spent back down at Muriwai beach, one of my regular and favourite outdoor locations. But rather than shooting landscapes, nature or people on horses, it was Robbie and his Samurai Sword! Sven and I requested he come out for an afternoon and show us some moves - Sven to test a new Fuji lens (review and pics here) and me, well, for something new and interesting to shoot! Robbie is a keen martial artist and motorbike rider, quite the Kill Bill character.

I've been interested in swordsmanship for a long time, but never a practitioner, so it was really interesting to hear a bit about it, and the art of Iaido/Iaijutsu in particular. I don't know enough to critique Robbie's technique, but he looked very fluid and confident to me, and was a great portrait subject. These are some of my favourite and I think most interesting portrait photographs to date.

Muriwai was a good location yet again, although my favourite shots on top of the sand dunes were very exposed to the strong wind, which resulted in sand going everywhere through our camera gear, hair, clothes and eyes, hence most of Robbie's poses facing to the right and away from the wind! I think the wind made for great shots though, with his Hakama blowing around and sand clouds rolling through.

Thanks again to Robbie for his enthusiastic help on a cold, windy, and very sandy day!

Crankworx - World's Largest Mountain Bike Festival

July 05, 2015 in Sport, Event

The world's biggest mountain bike festival Crankworx came to Rotorua, New Zealand this year, for the first time in the southern hemisphere and one of only two locations outside of its home in Whistler Colorado. My shooting buddy Sven is a big MTB fan and was keen to get along and take some photos, so we made a two-day trip down to Rotorua on the Thursday and Friday event days, time to run back to Auckland to photograph a wedding on Saturday! I don't know much out MTB so it was interesting figuring out all the lingo and different events etc. The main parts we caught were the 'Speed & Style' and Downhill competitions, and practice sessions for the Slopestyle, Pump Track and Downhill events. As well as enjoying figuring out all the events, I also had an opportunity to try out some new gear from Fuji, being the new 50-140mm f/2.8 telephoto zoom lens, on the X-T1 body. The tele shots in this post are all with this combination, but anything normal-wide is on my Nikon D600 (18-35/50mm lenses). Not knowing much about the events, or looking for any particular riders meant that I concentrated just on finding interesting angles and graphic shapes in my shots - maybe not as useful for say advertising or MTB magazine use, but it kept me interested!

Fuji 50-140mm f/2.8 Lens Discussion and Review

The rest of the post is a basic 'review' of my experiences with this lens for shooting sports, which you will probably want to skip if you're not a camera person :) There are plenty of photos to come too, so don't miss that part!

I was very keen to try this camera/lens with the hope it might be a nice lightweight option for the equestrian sports I had been photographing, as the Nikon gear gets really heavy and painful over an 8hr day! Unfortunately I found the autofocus speed quite lacking, and in particular the focus tracking wasn't up to scratch, meaning that most shots really needed to be pre-focussed (i.e. choose a fixed point to focus on and wait for the target to come through the frame). The key metric here is probably my 'hit rate' afterwards - shooting sports with my D700 I get probably a 90% hit rate of properly focussed shots, but on this combo it might have been like 20% or worse. Taking a series of say 5-8 photos of each rider coming past might result in 1-2 sharp shots, even after 2 days of practice.

Reduced focus speed and responsiveness is still to-be-expected on a mirrorless body compared to an SLR, but an issue which I hadn't seen mentioned much before, but actually turned out be the deal-breaker, was the long viewfinder black-out time - if you're trying to track a moving object, shooting at up to 8 frames per second, the viewfinder stays black just about the whole time, and with significant lag, so you actually can't follow your subject! Even after you've pre-focussed and composed, you're still shooting blind once the rider enters the frame and you hold down the button. I did also try this lens out on slower-moving horses the next weekend, and it was still equally difficult then. BUT the news is not all bad, which I'll cover in the next paragraph :)

For moving subjects and sports, I absolutely would not recommend this combination as I tested it - BUT of course the new v4.0 firmware just came out last week, which promises significant upgrades in focus speed and tracking. No idea if it improved the blackout time, but I can only recommend trying it out with new firmware before making any decisions on this combination. The other good point is that image quality is great, nothing to complain about at any focal length or focus distance that I tried, and was sharp all over the frame. The weight is also much less and much more pleasant to use for an extended period than the old school 1kg+ full frame f/2.8 zooms, as well as physically taking less space in my bag and having decent IS for handholding at lower shutter speeds - but do remember that IS isn't useful for sports where you need high shutter speed to stop subject motion anyway. So, overall a mixed bag for this combination. The lens was all good, but the system itself couldn't keep up with fast-paced subjects in more ways than one - not sure how much comes down to the body vs. the lens, but I expect this will be greatly improved in the next generation of Fuji bodies. For my money, it's just not quite ready for prime time, so I'm stuck using the heavy lens for sport for a while longer yet - but I suspect a mirrorless future for me is not too far off!

Stars at the International Horse Trial

November 24, 2014 in Equestrian, Event

Last weekend I had the opportunity to shoot the two-day 'Fiber Fresh International CIC Horse Trial' down at Woodhill Sands, which this time included some international and NZ star riders in the upper levels, going up to CIC (Concours International Combiné) 1-star and 2-star classes. This is a step above what I've previously shot - I've done 1-star and 2-star levels in the national competition, but not international level, and haven't seen these champion and Olympian riders before! The highlight of the day was shooting Blyth Tait and Jock Paget, being in my limited knowledge the top two names in NZ equestrian! There were some other big names including Athens and Beijing Olympian Heelan Tompkins, Athens Olympian Matthew Grayling, and young stars Charlotte Grayling and Lauren Alexander. Apologies to all the other excellent riders not mentioned by name, my equestrian knowledge is still a bit limited! And if you're not interested in my very amateur commentary, you can check out all 3000 images on my equestrian website here!

Woodhill Sands posted a good run down of the day's events on their website here, but suffice to say that Blyth Tait was the big winner, to nobody's surprise. Jock Paget did well also, riding on three different horses in different classes, so I got quite a few shots of him. It's quite common FYI for the professional riders to have several horses at each event, but it must make for a busy day! It was a good competition, and an interesting cross-country course. I'm slowly learning some of my preferred locations to shoot out up on the ridges above Woodhill, but for the top level I chose to shoot down by the last few jumps before the finish line of the cross country.

The showjumping and dressage rounds were another story altogether as the weather was quite windy and rainy on the Saturday afternoon. I stuck it out all day, hiding behind a judges booth between rounds, which gave me just enough time and protection to wipe the raindrops off my lens each time! The top levels were on at the end of the day, in the worst weather - I still managed a good selection of shots for each of them, although they don't seem to show quite how wet the weather (and me, and my camera) were by this time! Luckily the weather sealing of the camera held up pretty well.

Shooting a two-day event is a lot of work, with around 16-18hrs of shooting time and taking around 5500 photos over the weekend, and at least as much time again in front of the computer processing the photos! But I'm definitely getting faster at this part, and it took me a lot less time than my previous two-day event. Which is good because I just agreed to shoot another two-day event next weekend in Kumeu!

Shooting Five Thousand Horses

May 30, 2014 in Equestrian

Hah well I doubt the shooting/shooting joke has legs any more... and it wasn't even five thousand separate horses... nevertheless, I shot five thousand pictures of horses the other weekend, at the Woodhill Sands 'AESI Fibre Fresh' Horse Trials. Woodhill Sands is a great location near Woodhill Forest, and I've been lucky enough to get a few jobs there lately photographing horse trials, showjumping and dressage competitions. The horse trials are particularly interesting to shoot, as the jumps start getting quite big in the higher classes, and difficult looking compared to the smaller events I've shot before. It's not Badminton-level yet, but I got to see and shoot some pretty good riders. But this is mostly about my latest challenges in photography, rather than actual horses. Which I know little about anyway.. The whole set of pictures is available on my equestrian website here.

Equestrian shooting is still new to me, but I'm (hopefully) getting more experienced and more understanding of what people are looking for in their photos. It's quite different compared to other photos I take, in that what I like is quite secondary to what the rider likes and wants to see, since I am of course trying to sell pictures to the riders! Still, I do my best to make sure that the image quality, composition and colour editing are up to my standards, and something i'm happy to have my name on. I'm trying to make some pocket-money here, but I still care about taking the best photos I can!

This gets to be a slight problem when you have over 5000 photos to edit after shooting a two-day horse trial - and this was even with me being quite conservative on the shutter in some cases so i'd still have card space left by the end of the day. Before I started shooting sports I only had 16GB of memory cards, which I quickly had to expand to 48GB just to keep up with the number of photos! Anyway, I had a lot of photos to process in a short time, since I really need to get all pics up within a few days of each event before people forget about them, or before they ride a different event the following weekend.

Next time: A post on the 1000 things that have to be correct for a 'good' dressage picture.

I started a trial of the Photo Mechanic software for this batch of photos, which was fantastic. I hadn't used it before, so it probably didn't save me a lot of time in this first occasion due to some clumsy operation on my part, but it is great for very quickly running through photos and making my selections of what to keep and throw away. It also has very useful tools for captioning and organising, which I used to add rider names and numbers to each photo for quickly finding the right ones later. I'd seen this software recommended before by sports shooters, and I could quickly see why I needed it too :)

The final tally was about 16hrs shooting over the weekend, and 30hrs editing time from Sunday night to Wednesday night before it was all done. So not much sleep for a few days, but i got it all done, and got some good feedback from the riders and the club. And even a few sales, although I won't be quitting the day job any time soon! I've already added a battery-grip to my camera since, to both save my wrist when shooting vertically for hours with a heavy camera, and also to increase my shooting speed from 5fps to 8fps. Of course the higher speed gives me more photos to edit, not less, but hopefully a better chance of capturing the 'best' jumping position for each rider. Nothing worse for me than having one or two riders where I just plain didn't get a good shot.

After the heavy workload here, I've been considering how to make it a bit easier, and I've come to these few learning points:

Shoot more consistently - keep the framing consistent so I don't need to spend much time cropping later, or at least can do whole groups at a time. Individually cropping every photo was at least half of my total workload I think.
Fill the frame - keep the zoom in tight on the subject so hopefully I don't even need to crop most of the pictures. I'm limited here by camera and lens selection, but it may be a good investment to buy a teleconverter and get another 40% zoom on my lens. Until somebody buys me that Nikon 400mm f/2.8...
Keep selections small - I may shoot 30-50 pictures of each rider, but in the end only a few of them are at the 'right' position to make a 'good' horse photo! No point editing all the photos if people won't buy the 'not so good' ones anyway. Relies of course on me learning and knowing which are 'good' horse poses first!

I've already shot another event since this one, which went a lot quicker in the editing, although I only shot 3000 pictures over one day that time :) Hopefully even faster next time!

Robbie and Iaido - the art of the Samurai Sword

Crankworx - World's Largest Mountain Bike Festival

Fuji 50-140mm f/2.8 Lens Discussion and Review

Stars at the International Horse Trial

Shooting Five Thousand Horses

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