The Decisive Moment

Sometimes time is the important part of an image. Like here, in this image taken yesterday afternoon of a golf ball about to be wacked:

Time is of importance here in two ways:

First, the moment. A millisecond later would have been too late; a millisecond earlier, too early. How do you capture these moments? By shooting a lot, set to continuous shooting. Shoot streams like this and if you are lucky, maybe one in five will have a good image like this. And that is with a fast-shooting camera like my 1Dx, which shoots 10 frames a second; a slower camera would give much less of a success rate.

Second, the motion. A faster shutter speed would have failed to show the club’s motion; a slower shutter speed, and we would have seen just a blur.

I shot this image with a 70-200mm lens, with the camera in manual mode at 400 ISO, f/2.8, 1/1000th second.

And for the record, I am a lot better shooting golf pictures than I am actually hitting the ball…

 

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