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A day in the woods


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What a gorgeous day yesterday.

 

I spent it at a field-shoot in Sheeprack Wood near Souldrop. It's an old coppice wood and very dense so it lends itself well to the design of archery field courses. I was with a group of about sixty archers who had great sport there yesterday.

 

I took a lot of pictures, of which this is my favourite. Taken late in the day when the light was going and featuring a long-bow archer. The pic's a bit noisy, but I had to wind up the ISO to 3,200 to get anything at all. Pity about the trousers . . . . . :wink:

 

20111113-Field-1.jpg

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im yet to do any feild archery but the concept really sparks my interest. With the exception of the gents shirt malfunction its a very impressive photo, ive spent a little time in a well lit hall failing to take many half decent photos so i understand just how impressive a moment this is to capture.

 

out of curiosity would you know what poundage the bow was? ive only managed to capture any reasonable images of sub 25lb bows without a flash..... dont fancy blinding the poor archers :lol: but the guys i would like to capture shoot much higher poundage.

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im yet to do any feild archery but the concept really sparks my interest. With the exception of the gents shirt malfunction its a very impressive photo, ive spent a little time in a well lit hall failing to take many half decent photos so i understand just how impressive a moment this is to capture.

 

out of curiosity would you know what poundage the bow was? ive only managed to capture any reasonable images of sub 25lb bows without a flash..... dont fancy blinding the poor archers :lol: but the guys i would like to capture shoot much higher poundage.

 

I doubt whether the bow would be drawing any less than about 50 lbs. The furthest target distance yesterday was 70 yds and you need a decent cast to keep the trajectory reasonably flat. I don't really understand the basis of your question. A longbow shot by a club archer is not likely to cast at more than about 150 f.p.s. so six inches of arrow movement is achieved in 300th of a second.

 

My picture was taken at 125th of a second at f/4.0 with a zoom lens set to 55mm; so there is nothing technically extreme in it other than the ISO 3200 to cope with the poor light.

 

I would try a slightly higher shutter speed if I was looking at a compound bow (which may cast at about 300 f.p.s.) but I wouldn't use flash (other than for fill-in) because it would stop all motion completely.

 

I will have a look at some other pictures from yesterday and see if I can produce some comparisons.

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I will have a look at some other pictures from yesterday and see if I can produce some comparisons.

 

Here are a couple for comparison. The first is a lady longbow archer, a relative newcomer, shooting a lighter longbow. It is framed at 50 mm but the shutter speed etc is the same and you can see that it makes little difference.

 

20111113-Field-2.jpg

 

The second is a lady recurve archer - here the arrow speed might be in excess of 200 fps and I shortened the shutter speed to a 200th of a second. The shutter release is marginally later than in the other two shots so the bow has had time to come to rest, but the arrow motion is not dissimilar. This one was taken a little earlier in the day with better light and an ISO of 1600.

 

20111113-Field-3.jpg

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thats really informative, i am very much completely new to some aspects of photography and the iso setting was one that i have no experience with (it lives in "auto" :D )

 

In most of my photography i tend to have a preference for frozen moments rather than a moment caught with some movement. Maybe thats where im struggling to explain why im not satisfied with most of my photos. But your examples have certainly opened my head up a little about the process.

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