February 03, Turin [IT ]
A full day of indoor competitive fitness (!!) with 4.500 participants (some of them doing several races). My spot was the second challenge, aka Sled push. We had countless waves of 40-55 athletes coming in all day long, with 1-2 minutes break in between. I had the Em1 III with the workhorse 12-40 F2.8 PRO and the EM1 II with the 7-14 PRO. Since our goal was to take close pictures, only in the last rounds I tried some longer shots with the Panaleica 35-100 2.8.
As always with Sportograf assignments, the challenge is about the lenght of the job: it’s always very long days, especially for IronMan competitions. Today, it was from 7 to 21.
What was good, or easy
White balance: the Em1 is a sharp shooter in this: a quick overview of the 9000 pics showed that about 50 were slighty unbalanced towards the green: a bit more than 0,5%. Reliability gives confidence and makes the work easier!
What was bad, or hard
… White balance!
There were a number of source lights, mostly white, but some yellow, and the sun light coming in slightly (depending on the hour of the day). This wild mix created hard conditions for the camera (I shot everything with auto-WB).
Lights.
Lightning was also a challenge: during the day, the large window was always burnt, since we had to expose for the faces. So I tried to shoot mostly in the other direction, with a darker background.
Lots of people!
Some waves were bigger than others, and it was hard to shoot every participant in every needed way – vertical, horizontal, closeup, portrait. So, we needed a bit of time to adjust and to learn smart movements among the lines.
Flare.
Artificial lightning has another effect: flare party! Especially with the wide 7-14, many spots are visible on the pictures. Honestly, they don’t bother me at all, but if you’re sensible to that… brace yourself.
Any surprise, good or bad
I have to be honest, I had no great expectations for this event: gym+indoor is not really my piece of cake.
For this reason I aimed at training myself in a few things: improving my handling of wider focals (= 7-14 f.8), and using ground lights to create interesting contrasts. About the first, I am improving, but still far from satisfying outcome. About the second, I am not completely happy with the profile pictures of the athletes; but this is because I did not find the perfect subject to choose (colors of the clothes/tone of skin, body position), or when I found it, it was covered by other athletes.
A few numbers
Pictures shot: about 9000 in 14 hours.
Final output: tons of Jpegs!
Equipment: Two cameras, Olympus Em1mkII, Em1mkIII, the first Zuiko 7-14 2.8 PRO and the latter with Zuiko 12-40 f2.8.
Finally, pictures!
