Middle School Girls Practice Track Meet

Yesterday, Long Beach had their second middle school girls track meet at Poly High School. This was thier practice meet, which will be followed by the league meet then the All-City Finals. Normally these meets are held at Lakewood High School, but due to some construction on their track fields, all of the meets are being held at Poly.

I expected it to be a nice sunny day after the wheather we've been having, but woke up to see that it rained over night. Now this isn't a bad thing, as I can and will shoot under any wheather condition. As a matter of fact I prefer to shoot under overcast / cloudy skies as it defuses the light and limits the shadows. While I was out there it sure looked like it wanted to rain, but never did, so it turned out to be a pretty decent day for shooting some action.

I brought two lenes to this meet. My 70-200 f/2.8L IS and the beast (300 f/2.8L IS). I love using the 300 for the running events but find that I will have problems with the distance when shooting the long and high jumps. When using the 300 I'll get a lot of people standing in front of me so that's what the 70-200 is for, but as it turned out I only used the 70-200 for the long jump to get close enought to the action to keep people from jumping in front of me.

Lakewood Track at Mayfair

It is offically track season for high school. Yesterday Lakewood has their first practice meet at Mayfair High School with Mayfair and Paramount attending. My son throws the shotput and discuss so I was able to quite a few of the events, such at high jump and pole vaulting.

My son threw first place for shotput and fourth for discuss. He was just off and took a hard fall during his warm up for the discuss. He just needs to get his head on straight and focus and he's going to do great.

It was a great day for track, but as the sun went down it sure did get real cold. I felt sorry for all of the athletes wearing t-tops and shorts. I guess that's what the warm up suits are for.

I used the "Beast" for all of these shots. I had my camera set on aperture priority at f/2.8 with an ISO of 100, which increased gradually to 1600 as the sun went down.

"Some running action"

"Hurdles"

"Discuss Action"

"My Son"

"Surfer Dude"

I posted the below surfing shots on Mpix forums and got some great responses, especially on the last shot, so I have another one that I'd like to share. For this shot I ran it through a Lucus Arts action in photoshop.

Surfing at Seal Beach

Received a call Monday evening from my sister telling me about the high surf Seal Beach was having. She told me they had to close both Seal Beach and Huntington Beach piers due to the high surf and it was expected to last through Tuesday. Unfortunately I wasn't off until Wednesday. Now I've been wanting to hit the beach on my day off during the week but the weather hasn't been the greatest. So with the nice warm days we've been having and the high surf warnings I went to Seal Beach to see if I could catch any surf action. There were plenty of surfers there but the waves were really lacking. Since I was there armed with the "Beast", my 300 f/2.8L lens and 1.4x converter, I decided to get some shots any ways.

Even though there wasn't much action, I did enjoy being out there watching and shooting the surfers. Most of them were young and appeared to be students of a surfing class.

A little mishap between these two. No one was hurt.

This guy would often hang five or ten while surfing.

While I was shooting the action I saw this guy come up. Now he doesn't really fit the look of a surfer, buy hey, he was working it and doing pretty good. A hell of a lot better then I could ever do. So way to go.

Wa Bam Fast Pitch Softball

So here are some pictures from yesterday's game.

And here are a few shots of my niece.