I feel the need.. the need.. for speed.

So the weekend of derby photography went off without a hitch.

Admittedly I was a bit nervous. Silly I know but I have that all too common fear of demonstrating in public what I do not know can hurt me. So from my seat out of the way, unobtrusive with my 300mm lense I focused on the season opener for the Rosecity Rollers (www.rosecityrollers.com):

http://picasaweb.google.com/masonite.burn 

Part of the class experiment/lesson this week involved messing with shutter speeds so that you black out the background and focus on your subject. Given the vast difference in lighting on the track and the audience behind them this was not too difficult - nor did it require the 4 full fstops the teacher advised.

It was an interesting trade - I lost some coherency in the bouts given I was behind a camera - they all went by quite fast. But seeing them through the telephoto lense exposed me to more personal aspects of the event - seeing it up close, the huddles, the jokes between jammers on the line, etc.  I will need to find that happy balance of enjoying derby for the sake of derby and playing with my new hobby.

P.S. A "masonite burn" is the rash one gets when you go down hard on a derby rink surface. It sounded neat so I am using that for now.  Someday soon I'll join the Flickr army and need to generalize the name since it will house derby and dogs and life pictures all at once.