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Hello!
Entry number 21 in the 365 Black & White Challenge is a photograph from the 2022 Australian Open.
I’m happy to report that my photographic trip to the Australian Open was more of a success than I could have anticipated. When I go out with the mission to try and get photos interesting enough for the website, I’m truly thrilled if I bring home one keeper image.
My mission for the Open was not only to watch some world-class tennis but to practice single-shot shooting on mostly moving targets. At a client shoot, I will shoot in bursts of two to three photographs for redundancy. This time I wanted to shoot with intention and with the hope of practising timing. When your images are coming onto your memory card at 95 Mb per RAW file, you want to try and keep some space on the cards for as long as possible. In comparison, my two Z6 cameras each produces a 48 Mb image.
I also took a vastly reduced kit. On a typical shoot, I will have at least two cameras and three lenses. This time, I took my D850 (because I wanted the 45-megapixel depth) and my 70-200 mm 2.8 lens. I wanted a walk-around lens as well and I decided to take the 50 mm 1.4. When anyone ever asks what lens they should buy I always ask if they have a 50 mm. It’s the best lens to learn on and the focal length provides a natural to the eye perspective. Plus I haven’t used mine since the early days of the blog, so it was definitely the time to talk it for a walk.
After looking through the many photos I shot I am over the moon excited to share a lot of them. As is my usual want I’m tossing up between showing them in order or hitting my favourites first and then spreading the rest out when I don’t have any other photos prepared for the blog. And as is my want I end up deciding that as it’s my blog, I can do what the heck I want.
Forgive me if you are not a fan of tennis but I have some photographs I’m really proud of that will be appearing for a little while. I will say that part of my excitement is that I’ve never considered myself a sports photographer. I’ve always treated sports as moving portraits or “Sportraits”. Bummer, that domain name is taken.
Anyway, I digress.
This photograph comes from one of the outside courts which are a lot of fun to photograph as you can get very close to the action. This is a good thing as I had my 50 mm walkabout lens on and not the zoomeister 200. Do not let the size of the 50 mm fool you. It’s tiny, but as you can see, it can hold its own against the big guns the press carry around, obviously without the zoom (and the $28,000 price tag). I was standing right on the fence-line when I took this photograph and I love all the detail in the image, including the muscles on this amazing player (whose name I have no idea) and the detail on the chain-link fence and fluffy microphone windbreaker.
If you have no idea how fast the balls are flying around, consider this. The tennis ball in this photo is elongated due to motion blur. Also, consider that this photograph was taken at 1/1600 of a second.
Be sure to click on the photograph to see it at a larger size., and I recommend looking at these photos on a monitor (as opposed to your phone) because the detail the D850 can record is stunning. I have the benefit of being able to view them on a 32″ monitor at home and I often sit here for ages looking at every part of the image.
What a day! I can not wait to share more photographs from this visit to the Australian Open with you.
Have a great day and I’ll see you in the next post.
Richard
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Photo Information:
Nikon D850
Nikon AF-S Nikkor 50mm 1:1.4G @ 50 mm
1/1600 | f/4 | ISO 100
Wednesday January 19, 2022 @ 17:45
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
#134
B&W 365 - 21/365 (5.7% complete)
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Great photo