P23: action with a motor drive

With so many people on the streets for the Champions League final  it was also a good chance to try out my "motor drive", well see how fast my camera could shoot.  Oh boy, it is fast, 9 frames per second of raw, in just over 2 seconds I had 20 photos and a sound like a machine gun as the shutter cycled.

I waited until the crowd at the city center had some animation and let fly
 

This was the first time I have ever used the continuous shooting function on any of my cameras, I don't like this feature, I prefer to time my shots to the action and think about when to hit the shutter.  The results of this experiment actually proved my point.  Modern cameras shoot so quickly that they generate a huge number of shots in a very short time.  There is little variance between the images, unless you really shoot for a long time, which would create far too many shots to be useable.   I shot RAW and so did have buffer overflow issues, limiting me to around 20 shots, but had I changed to JPG and perhaps used a smaller image size, I could have filled my memory card in a coupe of minutes.

Of the 20 shots I selected the following as the best and cropped to a square to remove the distracting elements on either side of the frame.  This image has the strongest interaction between the girls in the foreground, the happy glance that reinforces the fact that this is a celebration not a conflict.

Even when I shoot sports I do not use continuous shooting modes, they simply generate too much material and I prefer to think about when I shoot.  I am not shooting commercially and so missing the key moment is not that big an issue, I am more interested in the context of the image than the precise capture of the optimum moment in time.

I also feel that technology has now moved on and that the use of a "motor" drive in photography is less vital than it once was, HD movie footage and 4K video means that individual video frames are approaching the quality of 35mm photographs at least in the context of web or newsprint publishing.  A frame from a 4K video will have enough resolution to use as a photograph and at 24 fps will capture many moments.  For the glossy magazines and perhaps for more art orientated work, there is still a use for this technique to generate the highest quality action image.  It is not for me though.  I have enough TB of data already.