Last Week Shooting

A business trip last week kept me pretty busy but I did manage to take along my Pen and do a little shooting.  The last three images here were taken in North Park, a local park just outside of Warrendale, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

The weekend brought the rare chance for me to run a cross country race (most races in our area are strictly road races, usually of the 5K and 10K variety).  The open race was followed by a high school cross country invitational meet so I stuck around for a little while to watch the kids run and do a little shooting.  Not knowing any of the boys in the race I decided to slow down the shutter speed and record the motion of the race rather than get images of any one boy.  My Pen outfit worked pretty well for that type of sports photography.  There's very little shutter lag so I could grab shots when I wanted them, but if I was trying to  get all the detail of the race this camera would have come up short.  The zoom only extends to 42mm, equivalent to 84mm in full frame DSLR terms, so not nearly enough reach, and zoomed out the fastest the lens will go is f/5.6 so much of the background stays in focus turning the action shots into more like "snapshots" without the ability to isolate the action.  But if I were planning on that type of shooting I would have brought my Canon and 400mm lens.  In this case I was happy shooting more artistically instead.

Enjoy!
Tom Laux
August 31, 2009