January 1st 2020 was spent working through some of my photos from 2019. It brought smiles as I looked back at some amazing memories of the things we did.
Including the trip to New York. It was a whistle-stop tour. We did many things including visiting Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, Bubba Gump at Times Square, taking in a Broadway show, and much more. We also missed many things on our list, and for those will have to go back sometime.
One unplanned experience happened while walking through Central Park. A troupe of street performers appeared from nowhere and started breakdancing right in front of us. A crowd gathered. We found ourselves in the front row of a sizeable audience. They were very slick and very good at what they do, working the crowd, and treating us to quite a show.
As part of the show they leaped over a young boy from the audience, while flirting with his mother and making jokes. They had a good schtick, very entertaining. There was much laughter.
The finale saw crowd participation as they pulled people into the centre of the circle and lined them up, ready to be barrel jumped by the smallest member of the team. At this point, they joked about his size and passed around their baseball caps for donations, saying it would cover the medical bills if this trick went wrong. A nice touch.
Setting up the shot
I did not want to miss this, especially as I threw $20 into the hat myself. Knowing what was coming I used the warm up time to set up for the shot I had in mind: A multiple exposure freezing the audience but showing the jumper in motion.
Putting the camera into high speed continuous mode I focused on the jumpees (go with it) and locked focus by dropping to manual. That stops the camera ‘helpfully’ trying to refocus when the button is pressed, and missing, because everything is moving so fast. It also stops the camera hunting focus for that split second when you press, which as any parent of an active child can confirm is more than enough to make the difference between getting a shot and missing a magic moment.
I set my aperture to give a sufficient depth of field to catch the main scene sharply while blurring the backround a little, to fix attention on the action and not the crowd. I set shutter speed low to freeze the crowd but blur the jumper, since nothing kills an action shot like freezing it totally.
I was ready. I waited.
The moment of truth
He starts his run. Hold breath, lock stance, aim, click and hold…
Seven shots per second. It took one second from leaving the ground to landing. Seven shots.
I nailed the launch, and the landing, perfectly. Credit to the jumper, he nailed them too. The jumpees didn’t get a single hair ruffled and all went home with smiles. No medical bills were incurred.
The audience cheered and applauded. We enjoyed this performance so much we let them keep the money. The troupe thanked everybody, picked up their gear and left, with a parting announcement they would be back in two hours. They make a pretty good living during the summer, it seems.
The crowd went on their way, as did we. Within two minutes it was just another empty park with random couples walking around with nothing to show that this had ever happened.
Except this.
To say that this was not a scheduled shot, I’m pleased it came out so well. I was in tourist mode so only had tourist gear: One camera, one lens. No lights, flashes, or grip. I made it work. All those seven shots needed was a little post processing in Adobe Lightoom, then stacking and masking in Photoshop.
I love being able to do things like this. 🙂