Friday, January 19, 2007

Badminton - Proton Malaysia Open 2007

More pictures to share. Please forgive my leck of skills in taking live-action photographs. This is my FIRST time and trust me, the players were moving fast.

Peter Gade (Denmark)

Koo Kien Keat (Malaysia)

Clark & Kelloggs (England)

Lin Dan (China)

How high can you jump?

Lee Chong Wei (Malaysia)

Wong Miew Choo (Malaysia)

Gao Ling (China)

On a personal note, taking these set of photgraphs were not easy at all. Firstly, I couldn't use flash as it disturbs the players. And you might think that a badminton stadium is bright enough to do away with the use of flash. Well, you are wrong! If it is , then photo-journalists won't be dragging along huge telephoto lenses in order to take sharp and high quality pictures. Basically, we are dealing with stopping motion, freezing an object for 1/250+ sec for the censor in the camera to process the image. And none of this would happen without light, and I mean sufficient light. All good telephoto lenses allow a lot of light to enter into the camera in a very short time, less than a second. These lenses are extremely expensive and troublesome to bring about. I don't have any of these lenses.

So I shouldn't complain when I don't get super sharp pictures because there is just not enough light and the lenses that I use are not seriously sport lenses. I do have a telephoto zoom lens but it is just slightly above average in quality because it is all I can afford right now.


I wasn't lucky enough to be able to walk freely in the courts like the journalists, which means one is closer in range to the players. There is no need to zoom the lens that allows more light to enter into the camera. I sat among the other spectators at various levels looking down at the courts, as if diving into a valley.

All in all, I had a lot of fun at the games and learned many new things about photography.

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