Evolution of an High School Wrestling Dad

[Hartzler]

It seems every time I take out my camera, I learn something. For instance, a friend asked me to photograph her wedding. Did you know if you take a camera from an indoor air conditioned room into a hot, humid Jamaican day, your lens inside and out immediately fogs up.

Yeah, I learned that one last month. But my passion this last year or so has been trying to photograph high school wrestling in doors with the relatively slow lens that I possess. Let me put it this way, my best lens was a 70-300 4.5-5.6 Nikon.

You can see my early effort in this shot. Note the way out-of-focus combines with blur to make this a truly forgettable shot.

From Digital Photography School

F5
ISO 1600
1/30
200mm

The above was a junior varsity shot. For varsity, they turn off all the lights, except for one overhead spot light.

From Digital Photography School

F4.2
ISO 1600
1/30
100mm

The only reason that shot is anything less than a total blur of arms and legs is I caught them at a stand-still moment.

Obviously, this wasn't working. But I can't afford the beautiful 2.8 lenses. So I went with a used Nikon 50mm 1.4. I'm not there yet, but I'm reading through the advice in the sports action forum and trying to eek out every bit of performance I can get given my photographic budget. Thankfully, we have the lights back on, but it's still very poor. I learned to move around until I found a spot that didn't have window light streaming in (talk about some digital noise).

From Digital Photography School

F1.4
ISO 1250
1/125
50mm

And a similar shot,

From Digital Photography School

F1.4
ISO 1000
1/180

Obviously, I need to up my shutter speed into the 1/500 range. But I'm having fun learning each time I go out to shoot a lot of great kids.

[pjflan7]

I know it stinks to not have the equipment that you know you need to have to pull off the shots you envision but my hats off to you for attempting to eke every ounce of performance out of your lenses

[leonaashlee]

Nice tries....I'm sure you'll get it eventually, whether that means a new lens or not.