This weekend hosts two big sporting events in Manchester, BT Great CityGames and BUPA Great 10k Run. As I was off shift this weekend I decided to take a wander and have a practice at some reasonably fast-paced sport photography.

It’s clear to me that I still have a lot to learn about balancing exposure, especially on bright days with areas of shadow. Much to my surprise though I spent most of the day using Manual Mode.

Early on I met a chap called Roger (www.theplacephoto.com) and he gave me some quick tips as to what shutter speed I should be using and so I went from there. My 600D doesn’t have a great burst mode so after about 200 shots I decided to switch to JPEG instead of RAW which did help slightly with the burst rate and stopped the buffer getting full quickly so I could spend more time capture images rather than waiting for the buffer to clear.

Of about 500 shots I took, I have narrowed it down to the 40 odd below – I found the Long Jump to be lots of similar images so didn’t think they did much for the album. Most of my time was spent at the pole vault and it seems most of my Images of that are of Katie Byres just because of the way she vaulted.

Edit: Some of my images are being used on Katie’s page about the event: http://www.katiebyres.com/2014/katie-compete-bt-great-citygames-manchester/