An Interesting View of Christmas

Christmas lights sparkle through a chain link on the antique railroad
log car displayed in front of the Post Office on Railroad avenue.

3A Football State Championship Tacoma Dome

Shot from the hip with a D7100, it can focus in this light even when
shot from the hip.

Add caption

 Coach Corey Sampson
First Black coach in Washington state to take a team
to the championships.

Squeezed

Shelton Varisty Volleyball and a copy of my fourth award from this year.

My Favorite Football Action Photo this Year.

Photography (C)2017 Shawna Whelan

ShawnaWhelanphotography@gmail.com

Football Shelton at North Thurston

As the season progresses I find myself getting into a nice groove.  Only one more home game left though.  These pictures were taken at South Sound Stadium.  SSS is  dark stadium with flickering lights, it might be darker than Shelton but at  least the light is uniform, no black holes other than in the end zones.

2017 WNPA Better Newspaper Contest

I just found out that I won four awards at the 2017 WNPA Better Newspaper Contest this weekend.

I won first place for Color Breaking news with one of my fire photos. I won second place for Black and White Photo Essay with my alpaca photos, and I got second place for Color Sports Action with one of my wrestling photos. We also won a shared second place award for Humor in Adverstising for my photo of the Shelton Varsity Bowlers.

These are state wide awards for photos I took in our community.
Our paper the Mason County Journal won first place for General Excellence again this year. That means the Mason County Journal is the best weekly newspaper in the state!

first place for Color Breaking news 

Second place for Color Sports Action

Second place for Black and White Photo Essay

Shared second place award for Humor in Adverstising,
shared with  Journal Staff who laid out the page

Shelton at North Thurston Football

Football and Varsity Photo Clips

More football Shelton vs. Yelm

Well, the home team lost again, but they did not get skunked this time, I captured both of the touchdowns.   At the start of the game I experimented with 75 point focus and focus priority over release priority.  I only tried these settings because my camera manual recommends them for football.

Even before the anthem was over 75 point focus proved to be useless so I switched back to single focus point.  Focus priority caused me to miss the kick off when the shutter would not release even though it was focused.  So I'm back to release priority as well.

It was fun to try new settings anyway.  None of my my pictures from this went into the paper as the paper had a reporter there taking pictures with a nice f /4 lens.

Touchdown Yelm

Touchdown Shelton!

When the home team plays the #2 ranked team in the state.

It's harder to get good shots of your home team when they are skunked.  Loving my D500 anyway.

With my D500 I can shoot in shutter priority and auto-ISO all night long and still get all excellent exposures. I think the anti-flicker tech is a large part of it. Also I accidentally a shot with pattern instead of spot metering and I got away with it just barely.  Spot metering can be problematic when the camera gets pointed at the ceiling lights in baskeball games, but that is not a problem with stadium lights.   ev +3 almost always, sometimes ev+7.   

Tonight I will try 75 point focus, I have also set my camera to focus priority over release priority.  So much to learn about my new camera.

My side camera caught a bunch of blurry shots.  I'm working to try to find out what the problem is.  I think I need to hold it more steady, I've also tweaked the focus settings a little bit.  I was thinking it was a problem with the lens and camera in the dark, but I now think I can make it work with a bit of tweaking.

side line shots ƒ/2.8

 

160.0 mm

1/250

 

6400

ƒ/2.8 

 200.0 mm

1/1000 

 2500 for daylight shots

ƒ/2.8 

 200.0 mm

1/750 

 12800  for darkest field shots 

ƒ/2.8

 

160.0 mm

1/250

 

6400

ƒ/2.8

 

200.0 mm

1/750

 

12800