Critique Wanted Enter the jumpy castle

KillRamsey

Hall of Famer
Location
Hood River, OR
Name
Kyle
The scenario: You're enjoying a farmer's market, and then your wife and friends all run into the kids' jumpy castle (not currently being used by any kids). You want to get pictures of this, and you want them from the inside. You have: an XT-1, the 14 f2.8 lens, the 35 f1.4 lens, and the pancake 27 f2.8. Time's a-wastin'...

Here's what I did (and I'm going to ask what you'd do differently, if something occurs to you):

1. Dictate 1/2000th to stop motion, but not 1/4000 because it is a little darkish in there.
2. Leave the ISO and aperture on auto.
3. Put the 14 on - it's pretty small in there. The 35 felt too long by far.
4. Pull back the clutch and focus manually by the distance scale on the lens barrel. Knowing the 14 is wide enough to be very forgiving, I just put it a touch in from infinity, which is like 7 or so feet anyway.
5. Bumped the EV by 2/3 to account for those bright windows.

And then I got in there, and spent half the time also jumping (so I'd be at their head level and get floating hair) and the other half on the ground (so I'd exaggerate the height of their jumps). Oh, and I also had fun. That's important.

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KBRX7921 by gordopuggy, on Flickr

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KBRX7975 by gordopuggy, on Flickr

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KBRX7972 by gordopuggy, on Flickr

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KBRX7960 by gordopuggy, on Flickr



Is there some technical aspect I overlooked? I'm happy enough with them. Just curious. My brain first said "oh I wish I'd had a flash," but then I remembered the 1/180 sync speed.... nossir.
 
A better result than I would have had - I know mine would be out of focus blurred which could have worked for a few shots

You can only capture with what you have at the time

Second thoughts - not enough chaos everyone is straight - try tilt & crop
 
I think you did very well here. The faces are very red due to the reflections off the bouncy castle, but the view through the windows looks normal so it seems the white balance was good. Whether you´d like the faces to be more normally lit (which would throw off the WB of the window views) is up to you.

Other than that, I agree with ReD - tilted frames would add to the bouncy feeling.
 
Very cool. I'll keep that in mind in December when the wife has her birthday at a giant indoor bouncy castle. She took our daughter to a place that has four giant bouncy rooms, and went in with our daughter. She liked it so much, we're having her (the wife's) birthday there in 3 weeks.
 
Very cool. I'll keep that in mind in December when the wife has her birthday at a giant indoor bouncy castle. She took our daughter to a place that has four giant bouncy rooms, and went in with our daughter. She liked it so much, we're having her (the wife's) birthday there in 3 weeks.

It's happened.

So there are 2 large rooms with high ceilings, and various LARGE inflated pieces of jungle gym equipment... jumpy castles, slides, obstacle courses, etc. We had about 15 people (and 3 or 4 kids) and spent half an hour in each room running around, getting sweaty, and goofing off. It was incredible.

Most of the time I was shooting with the stock XT1 flash, and at either 1/60 or 1/180 depending on where I was. I'd guess that 2/3 of the total shots were with the 14. Using it meant I got a manual focus clutch with DOF indicator, and hard stops on the focus. THAT let me crank it out to infinity, and dial it back in slightly if the subject got closer than about 8 feet. Doing this meant I effectively got to ignore focus, which is no small advantage in dark room full of people running full speed. Even with the 27 pancake on for the other 1/3 of the shots, I ran manual focus, looking through the EVF (it's set to zoom in to 100% if I start turning the focus ring so I can check-set-and-half-press).

So I ran around with them, manually focusing and shooting flash with mostly a wide lens. Some of the results:

One of these is mine
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KBRX1359 by gordopuggy, on Flickr

Good launch height
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KBRX1341 by gordopuggy, on Flickr

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KBRX1389 by gordopuggy, on Flickr

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KBRX1375 by gordopuggy, on Flickr
 
No, I didn't use Burst. Indoors, I assumed I couldn't with the flash. Outdoors (first series, a month + ago) in that bouncy castle, I either didn't think to use burst, or I decided I didn't need to. I honestly don't remember which.
 
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