Despite this year being horrendously busy, H and I managed to use all of our gymnastics season tickets and even though our yearly conferences are in April, we even managed to make it to the NCAA finals. The Lady Utes took second place overall this year against some tough competition and it looks like we are in a good place to perform even better next year. The gymnast in the introductory image is Ashley Postell who is currently a junior, so she will be back. Unfortunately this was likely the last time I will get to see Nicolle Ford compete as this was her graduating year.
Other gymnasts also turned in impressive performances with the gymnast below, Emily Parsons performing one of the stronger floor performances of the night.
Finally, some notes on photographing indoor sports…. Its expensive. Tickets are cheap, access to the floor is easy with photo or press passes, but the glass that you have to buy to go on the end of your camera is decidedly not cheap. I’ve entertained doing more photography of the gymnastics team here, but it will mean buying some really fast lenses to get the images I am thinking of. Of course telephoto lenses are what most folks use to get closer to the action, but even the fastest telephoto zooms are not quite fast enough to stop the motion of an indoor sporting event like this. The fastest moving parts of the body will always get blurred, even with apertures wide open at f/2.8, leading me to start looking at some fixed focal length lenses in the f/1.2-f/1.4 range. This means of course more hassle for me in composing the image, but it will likely have to be done to obtain the images I have in mind.
