Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/08/07
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I have tended to carry a point and shoot as a backup camera. Ultimately, I bought an Olympus Stylus Epic because, when closed, all optical parts, even the flash window, are protected, so that I can carry it in a trouser pocket. Prior to that, my backup was a Yashica T4, whose lag is very noticeable; I estimate it to be about 1/4 second. Still, one summer when I fell on my face at the bottom of a flight of stairs at Francisco Franco's chapel near Madrid (see, the fascist got a last lick at me) and damaged both a zoom lens and a Nikon EF, I was left for a fortnight with nothing but the Yashica. It was great discipline, being forced to zoom with my two feet. The only real restriction was when I went to the zoo, where it made no sense to photograph anything smaller than an elephant. Back to the topic of shutter lag, human reaction lag, and sports photography. Ted really has a point. For years, I would try to get pictures of show jumping with the horse positioned at the top of the jump, and always managed to get the horse on the way down. But I also was an untalented rider. Now, there are at least two schools of how you ride over a jump. The older school had you getting your butt out of the saddle, with your weight distributed between your feet and your knees. The newer school had you sitting normally on the saddle, but going forward as the horse leaps. This gave you better control. The catch was that if you failed to anticipate the horses leap, you would go off balance backwards, and to prevent falling, you were likely to give the horse a painful jab in the mouth as you yanked on the reins, thus giving the horse wonderful negative training about jumping. So, one very clever riding instructor had us counting backwards "3, 2, 1, 0," going forwards on "zero." The idea was that we had to estimate from the get go how many strides the horse was from the jump. And, of course, doing this out loud, if one missed, one's embarrassment was audible to the rest of the class. The point to all this belabored story was that after I learned how to estimate how many strides the horse was from a jump, I used this technique on the ground to photograph jumping horses and it really worked. - -- Herbert Kanner kanner@acm.org 650-326-8204 Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will pee on your computer! - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html