Photographing motion at night on a tennis court...
"Come down to the tennis courts," they said. "It will be fun," they said, "but we only have three racquets..."
So down I went to the park with no intention of actually playing any tennis, since the three racquets had been spoken for, but I figured I could offer some moral support. Armed with a mug of hot chocolate and my camera bag, I spent an hour Asian-squatting alongside the court, hoping to capture some motion.
I've been using the 18mm-35mm Sigma Art Lens on my Nikon D3500 body, which I feel has allowed me to be a fairly confident amateur photographer. But I've had this camera since May and I still can't believe this was the first time I tried to do any action shots. I immediately realized that I hadn't the slightest idea of what I was doing (after analyzing the photos later I also realized I forgot to bump up the ISO) and then felt very ridiculous. But my hot chocolate was way too hot to drink, so I contented myself to fiddling with the settings and set my expectations pretty low. At one point I had a moment of morbid curiosity and put the camera into auto mode. Regrettable. Promptly switched back to manual and continued experimenting with things. If I were more prepared I would have provided the settings for each photo below, but I am not prepared and I refuse to feel guilty about it.
Of course, everything in camera was extremely dark. Throwing them into Lightroom later and turning up the exposure slider was extremely entertaining, and then I was surprised by the handful that didn't turn out to be half bad. I had to tell myself to be okay with the grainy quality and after a while I began to like it. The colors are a little strange, but I've discovered that if I tell myself "This is art!" right before looking at something I find sometimes that I'm a lot more receptive to the unconventional and imperfect. The images below are the handful that turned out fairly alright. I resisted the urge to post the ones with unfortunate facial expressions... sorry. I thought I'd be kind to my buddies this time around.
Overall, not too disappointed with how things turned out. I will definitely be trying again. Maybe I'll try the skate park.
