A challenging environment with flickering lights and inconsistent white balance all the time. I found myself on this International Meeting of Rhythmic Gymnastics about a month ago and immediately I found myself in front of quick action, low light and weird white balance making this photo shooting a real challenge.
The girls moved so quickly I had to push the camera beyond its limits just to freeze the motion enough for a clear shot. I tried every lens I could get my hands on in addition to mine, but still the light was always changing and the colors were either washed out or deep dark with noisy details. I could not do much except my best and I could only wait and see what I could do in Lightroom after the shooting. I had to boost the ISO very high up to 6400 and made a new custom sharpening profile in Lightroom for the entire series.
What I hadn't taken into account was the large amount of photos I took in order to capture enough motion to select the best photos later. I almost filled my 32 GB card from this event and had to select from a total of almost 1500 photos, being very strict to myself and narrowing down the best to almost 400.
To my defense, I didn't want to neglect any participant by not capturing their best moments and their best moments were too many I am afraid! The link to their photographs (over 300) are here.
Some of the participant names I caught on the board during the event are:
Luiz Simone
Ecem Cankaya
Dogan Duygu
Kilavuz Selin
Bolotina Elena
Bazhko Hanna
If you happen to know any of them, please inform them that they can download their photos WITHOUT the watermarks if they drop me a line, so I can give them the link and lift the restrictions. Unfortunately, I could not get in tough with some of them to inform them how to download their photos.