This past weekend I got to cover the Element Skate Contest down at Chula Vista Skatepark. It was my first taste of shooting skateboarding in a contest enviroment and I learned a lot of valuable lessons. The camera performed flawlessly and I was able to take over 600 pictures total. The biggest lessons I learned were as follows:
- I need a faster lens. I had the camera set to shutter priority to eliminate any motion blur. Most of the day I was shooting with my 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens and occasionally with my 70-300mm f/4-5.6. It was a little overcast and some of the shots were slightly underexposed. Due to the fast action of skateboarding I don’t think it is a realistic solution to slow the shutter down. Instead, I think getting a lens that is at least an f/1.8 will give me enough light. Ideally I would like to get something more around the f/1.2 speed.
- I need a fisheye lens. I think I could capture the energy, grace, and drama of the action better with a fisheye and I could keep the focus of the shots on the skateboarder. Plus, a fisheye is invaluable for capturing the wide-angle shots of the park and crowd (a place were I really felt my limitation of lenses since the park is so expansive).
- In the skateboarding photos I need to get in closer and fill the frame up with the skateboarder. I felt like a lot of the shots had too much open area and my subject tended to get minimized or lost.
- I needed to capture more personality and emotion shots of the audience and contest participants. A skateboarding contest is so much more than skateboarders doing tricks and I feel to some degree I missed out on the human element of the event. Much like skateboarding itself, the contest was about having a good time.
Overall I was very happy to be involved in the things I love: skateboarding, photography, hanging out with friends, and enjoying life! My next venture, in addition to continuing my skateboarding and sport photography, is to start taking photos of scenery such as sunrises, sunsets, landscape, and city shots.
I recently was doing some computer maintenance and found some old videos. All editing done by yours truly, MHough. Click on the link below to see the rest of the videos. Enjoy!
Continue reading ‘Old videos ressurected from the past…’
Check out my little brother’s new plugin for Wordpress. It’s called TubePress and basically allows you to share your favorite YouTube videos. Here’s a working version and here’s the link to download it.
A few weeks ago I published a post of my favorite Wordpress plugins. In that list I included a plugin called EditorMonkey. Unfortunately, the plugin turned out to be a lemon and was a real pain to remove. When I first tried to remove it by deactivating the plugin from the Wordpress admin panel, I could not restore the Wordpress TinyMCE editor and what remained was a meager toolbar that left me handcoding my posts in pure HTML. So, after scouring the internet blogs I was able to piece together a solution to remove the plugin and return Wordpress back to it’s original state. Enjoy!
- Deactivate the plugin from within the Wordpress admin panel.
- Go to your database, and search for the wp_usermeta table. Caution: be very careful making changes here! You can end up corrupting your entire site if you aren’t paying attention. Make sure to backup your site before proceeding.
- Browse within the wp_usermeta table and delete any entries that start with an em_ .
- Next, within the same table, go to the rich_editing field and set the value from false to true.
- Delete the plugin from your wp-content/plugins directory.
- Voila! EditorMonkey is gone and the default TinyMCE editor has returned.
Well, although the Steelers lost, the free seats I got were great and I really got to test out the new camera which really showed it’s power. Of course, I managed to somehow sit next to the one drunken neanderthal of the section. Too bad he didn’t stay home at the frat house instead of coming to the game. The Steelers fans, however, were out in droves…it felt like Pittsburgh West!
