I recently wrote about spending a bit of time at a local cricket club watching a couple of games for a while. I haven’t really photographed cricket much so didn’t have strong ideas about what to try and get with regard to angles and action. I was just playing around, really, to see how things came out. I ramped up the frame rate for some of the shots that the batsmen were making. I was interested to see how I might miss the critical moments and how far the ball had moved between frames.
Now, clearly getting the shot is something that technique and skill should deliver. Compensating with the tech is not ideal but I wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone. Instead, I was just out having fun. Consequently, I decided to use a feature on the R3 that I only occasionally drag out and that is the super fast frame rate of 194fps. This will not use autofocus or auto exposure once the sequence starts, but that isn’t a problem in the 0.2 seconds that it takes to shoot the 50 raw frames that are the limit.
It is amazing that, even with such a high frame rate, the ball still can move quite a distance between shots. You do end up with a ton of frames that are going straight in the bin. Since the ball either hasn’t arrived in frame or it has gone. That is a pretty easy process of culling of course. You also never know whether a given delivery is going to result in anything. You can get 50 frames as the batsman lets the ball through. Those are even easier to cull! Did I get anything I really liked? No, to be honest, I wasn’t too excited by any of them. However, it has got me thinking about what would make for a better shot. I shall have to work on that and head back to see if I can improve things.
In the days before the M3 around Winchester was built, you used to come off the motorway on to an A road that took you past Winchester before you then rejoined the motorway north of the city. My recollection of this road was that it ran alongside some brick arches. At the time, I had no idea what it was and, once the motorway was built, I couldn’t be sure whether my memory was accurate. Since we moved here, I have ridden on the trails south of the city and one of them takes you over the Hockley Viaduct. This is a disused railway viaduct which is now a trail. Once I saw it, I knew this must have been what I remembered.
