My wife recently ran the Around the Bay road race, in Hamilton Ontario. I tagged along for the ride, and ended up running into an interesting lighting problem.
I wanted to get a shot of Jen crossing the finish line, and was doing a few test shots by firing at the race volunteers who were milling about before the first competitor crossed the line. On my first few, I noticed that the people in my shooting zone were getting blown out by quite a bit. Why? The arch over the line contained a bank of flood lights that lit the competitors at the crucial moment. Since this area was small compared to the rest of the frame, the camera's meter tends to ignore it and base exposure on the rest of the frame. It doesn't know that this is the only par tof the frame that matters!
I could have dialed down the exposure compensation a bit, but in situations where the lighting is relatively constant, I prefer to shoot manual. This way, the camera can't pull a fast one on me and change the exposure just when it matters. So I took note of the previous exposure, switched to manual, and sped up the shutter speed. My final exposure was iso 640, 1/200 (fast enough to capture the action), and f4 (more forgiving than f2.8).
Here are some shots from that day:
Jen finished in 3:06:56, a respectable time for her first 30km run:
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