Time Exposures

Yesterday my high school had a "black out" pep rally. Now, normally I babysit the kiddos who don't want to attend the spirit show but yesterday I decided I needed to go and take some pictures ;)

It was school and I learned a few things. #1-I like my own cameras better than the school cameras. We have Digital Rebels at the school and they are great little cameras, but I could not find the menu function to put the focus on the back button instead of the shutter, and it's hard to shoot time exposures in the dark with the camera's focus control attached to the shutter release. I had to turn off the auto focus and focus manually in the dark and that was not easy.

#2-I love my flash. I have one of the newest Canon flashes and it is really powerful. At school I have some 430EX flashes for my kids to use and they are great but not quite as powerful as my flash so I wasn't able to pop the light into the drill team to get a dancer lit and surrounded by the glowing lights. I would have had to get up and walk closer to the drill team to do that and since I don't have the remote to lock the shutter open that just wasn't possible.

#3-I love my lenses. The Rebel comes with an 18-55 mm lens on it and that is great for most situations but it wasn't wide enough for me to capture everything and it didn't zoom in enough for me as well. I like the range I have with my personal lenses.

All in all though I made some nice photos. A good photographer can work with any equipment, they might just have to work harder and make some changes to the way they shoot.

The drill team did a dance with glow sticks and lights on their shoes.

A little longer exposure of the the drill team's dance.

All the kids got glow sticks and some kids were just loaded up! This girl was sitting on the floor and her wrists were covered in glow bracelets.

A 4 second exposure with a little flash popped in. I held the flash in my hand and fired it with the test button instead of firing it with the camera. She was close enough to me to make it work, my arms were just long enough.

In honor of Summit's win over their rival Mansfield! I call this "WIN!" I saw this football player sitting in the second row and i just stood up and leaned over until i was close enough to fill the frame with his face. I would have liked to have been a little farther away...but the 18-55 made me get in his face. It's OK though the picture was worth it.