Capturing Movement

A couple of comments about speed before we leave that. Did you know that memory cards (and card readers) have speeds also? You can buy the fastest, fanciest camera out there but if you are using a slow memory card, your camera will not be fast? Or if you have a very fast memory card but your reader is slow....it will take f o r e v e r to download your photos? Just a couple of things to look into if you start getting serious about photography. The nicer the camera, the better the cards and readers need to be!

I was using my sister's Rebel at her son's wedding as she had a newer model than me at the time (since then, my Rebel has broke, I had a 50 D that was stolen and now I have the 7D). As the attendants were coming down the aisle, I was trying to capture each one of them, but her camera kept saying that it was "busy"....talk about frustrating. I looked at the SD card she had and it was not fast enough. It would only process so fast, and it was not fast enough to keep up with the wedding! Not a good thing at a wedding!

I have shared with you that I like having video capabilities on my cameras. Another approach I like to take to capture movement is to take a series of still shots of something that is moving. Most cameras will have different modes for shooting....like the timed shot I told you to take in low light situation. Cameras will also have the option to take one photo, several photos or a lot of photos, really fast! My 7D will go really fast taking a lot of photos in a row. I like to make DVDs of still shots and if you take several shots, it will look like a slowed down video on the DVD. It is very cool.

Some examples of things I have done this with is the Carousel in Paris, the glaciers calving in Alaska, or modes of transportation like a train coming into the station or a sea plane taking off. When I was capturing the calving of the glaciers and my camera was going click, click, click, click....very fast, my sister asked me, was that you making all that noise? LOL! It is a very cool sound....like the paparazzi or something!

This is also a great too to use when trying to capture something that is hard to capture, like a whale coming up out of the water or a kiss at a wedding. Those are brief occurrences that you have to have very good timing to capture. Set your camera on a continuous shooting mode and then you will get a shot at the precise moment you want it!

These might seem like crazy things that only a fanatic would do (guilty as charged!) but they really are fun things to play with....I hear the train a coming....it's coming round the bend....