This summer has been the summer of time-lapse photography.  More often than not I am out shooting material for my latest time-lapse video that will be finished very soon.  So I decided to take a little break and try something different.  A few weeks ago I decided to go down to the new skateboard park with a friend of mine, Michael Albany.  I was really excited because it was going to be a new experience for me.  Being a Landscape photographer, the world of action photography is totally foreign to me.  When arriving at the park it seemed easy enough to determine the best location to shoot and find out who the skilled skateboarders and bikers were.  That was about as far as my landscape photography knowledge took me.  Lighting, camera angles and composition for a dynamic subject added a whole new layer of complexity.  Thankfully my friend Michael gave me some tips and showed me how to use a flash.  Don’t get me wrong I’ve used a flash for portraits and static subjects, but not for anything like this.  I felt like a complete fish out of water.  My respect level for action photography went way up after this experience.  Those pictures we all see in those magazines are pretty difficult to capture.  It was a good experience though and I definitely want to get some more practice at this kind of photography.  The other nice thing that came out of this shoot was that I finally got to try out the rapid burst mode on my Canon 7D.   It’s no 1D but shooting at 8 frames per second was more than enough for me.  I was also amazed at how well the 19-point auto focusing system worked.  Almost every shot was in focus.  At any rate, I decided not to post any of the shots that I used the flash.  To be honest they were pretty crap and probably will never see the light of day.  We’ll see.  However I did manage to get this shot.  It’s composed of 5 different shots taken in burst mode, the photos were then merged together in photoshop to produce this.

Hope you all are having a great rest of the summer and I’ll be back soon