Tips and Tricks for Photographing Parkrun and other Running Events

Hours 0 to 41

As I say in my profile, I’m not a complete beginner, I’ve been photographing the runners at the Black Park Parkrun on the second Saturday of odd months for long enough to have received my “25 Volunteer” t-shirt a while ago.

This post covers some of the tips I’ve picked up on the way, including much that I have learnt from George Mardall (the main Black Park Parkrun photographer).

Parkrun is a fantastic institution that is encouraging hundreds of thousands of medium fitness people to get out of bed on a Saturday morning and do something great for themselves.  I am very proud of even the tiny level of support I can give it.

This is not a “know everything” post.  I intent to come back to it in the future, with some hopefully major improvements.

If you have any ideas or thoughts, please post comments below.

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Hours: 4 to 26

The Old Approach to Shooting Fireworks

The standard advice for shooting fireworks is:

• Use a tripod
• Use a cable release or wireless remote to trigger the shutter if you have one
• Turn on Long Exposure Noise Reduction
• Shoot the highest quality file you can
• Set the camera to a low ISO, such as 200
• A good starting point for aperture is f/11
• Instead of choosing a shutter speed, set the camera to Bulb (B) which allows you to keep the shutter open as long as you want. Expose for the entire fireworks burst. You can even keep the shutter open for multiple bursts
• Turn off the autofocus, otherwise it might have difficulty locking onto focus. Manually focus your lens at infinity.

Conventional shooting leads to conventional images – see my thoughts on Philosophy of Photography

This time I chose to do almost the exact opposite.

If you have any ideas or thoughts, please post comments below.

To see more posts on other photographic topics, or to follow my learning progress, please like or follow me on the social media channel of your choice to the right.

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Hours: 0 to 0

Merging Lightroom Catalogs

When away from home, on holiday or elsewhere when I may be taking lots of photos, I invariably download these to my laptop.  I delete the poor shots, ignore the average, hopefully “Pick” a few good ones, and cannot help myself from having a first stab at post-processing.

The problem is: when I get home, how do I amalgamate these shots into my master Lightroom catalog?  If I simply move the files from my laptop to my main desktop computer, I lose all the post processing I have done along with any tagging, collections or rankings.

— I am using Adobe’s Lightroom Classic CC without any major personalisation on both my desktop and laptop computers.  To see a description of my kit, click here. —

If you have any ideas or thoughts, please post comments below.

To see more posts on other photographic topics, or to follow my learning progress, please like or follow me on the social media channel of your choice to the right.

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Hours: 0 to 0

Competition Strategy & Tactics

Last season I won the Stoke Poges Photographic Club’s Photographer of the Year award, calculated by taking each person’s top 12 scores from the season’s 8 competitions (4 prints and 4 projected digital images).  Scoring out of 20, I had 9 20s and sufficient 19s to give my top-12 a total of 237.

We are a fairly small club of about 50 members, divided pretty equally between “Intermediate” and “Advanced” members.

I spent my first year with the club just watching the competitions and how they were judged and it became apparent that people consistently lost points for easily rectifiable reasons.

At our club, everybody, unless they have an RPS distinction, starts in Intermediate and progress only once they finish in the top two places of this section.  I’m a competitive bugger and in my second year with the club I set out to win.  I applied what I had learnt and am now in the advanced group.

Is this a cheat-sheet, checklist? (Yes)

 

Tip No. 1: The mathematics of the scoring means, “you have to be in it to win it.”  Enter every competition with:

1. The maximum number of images
2. Where possible split these equally between the Set-Subject and Open categories
3. Submit high risk images, “more of the same” shots that might score 16, 17 or 18 are no good. The only thing that matters for winning is the number of 20s (and 19s).  The 13s, 14s and 15s are forgotten.

If you have any ideas or thoughts, please post comments below.

To see more posts on other photographic topics, or to follow my learning progress, please like or follow me on the social media channel of your choice to the right.

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