"TPTTP of photography-Set 2

Now once you have the timing down with one person it's time to move on to using two people. The challenge here is to now pick which person you are going to watch and time yourself with as they both jump. The real tricky part is to get both of them to jump at the same time. Even to have them with their hands in position and their faces showing the proper realism can be quite tricky.

These two were probably one of my best catches yet. Both in about the top of their jump and both at the same time. Not an easy thing to do.

In this one the trick was the fact that both of them were literally turning around during the action but I luckily caught it at the right time.



Have fun practicing these types of action shots. (Again with only one chance to do it right each time they jump, no multiple shooting in 3 seconds because your flash units have to recharge.) Of course the real answer is to get faster cycling flash units but I am not on that kind of a budget.

"The Perfect Timing Takes Practice" ( "TPTTP of photography.

OK I used to think that TPTTP of photography would be easy and it is if you can set your camera on multiple exposure but if you are using a studio flash system that requires 5 to 6 seconds to refresh you get only one shot at a time or one shot per jump. I think after 3 years of lots of practice I am finally getting my timing down a little bit. So my challenge to you is to start to practice taking jumping pictures on just one person. Tomorrow I'll show some with two people.It does take practice because yo only have a split second to get the shot when they are in the air. I find myself having to push the shutter a half a pulse before I want to and then I get the shot pretty good.

Lay down on the floor and shoot up for the illusion that the person is really jumping high.

Yes this one was actually two of us timing it perfectly. I can't jump, cross my legs and pull that kind of a pose in a split second in the air so that I won't break a lot of my body parts on the way down but he sure did it well.


These are a lot of fun but it hasn't been easy to get the right timing. It does take practice.

More archived photos

Of course I have thousands of images that are in my archives and from time to time I will post them just so I never put the same things on twice,(if I can help it.) Anyway here are a few for tonight. Tomorrow night I will start a series of four blogs dealing with "The Perfect Timing Takes Practice" (otherwise known as the "TPTTP of photography. Yes I just made that up.)

A blast from the past

I decided tonight to add just a few of the images that I have recently located in my archives from the past. I am sure this will happen many times as I have a lot of images that I have archived over 40 years of photography.




This one is a tornado in Southern Utah that I saw while at a scout camp.

A look at the Moon

Our eyes are so amazing. We can look into the night sky and see the moon and the trees through which we are seeing it. Then we take a camera to capture a moment and the moon just becomes a big white blob or the trees disappear. So I decided to try an HDR merge on it in photoshop and took my tripod, shot a sequence of 4 bracketed images and then let photoshop do an HDR version. The very first try looked really great but I failed to save it and somehow on the second and following tries it didn't work nearly as well but the following images show the 4 images from which the final image was derived. Looks like I have some more experimenting. (I was amazed at how fast the moon really travels across the night sky.(4 shots on a tripod with the camera set on timed delay so it wouldn't open the shutter until the camera was still and it moved quite some distance in the course of those shots. A little harder to do a true HDR merge.)