The gym is extremely light with white walls, a reflective ceiling and ample high windows. When I started photographing I was pretty disappointed with the light as it was very flat and no strong sunlight was coming into the gym to give the light some direction and interest.
You can see that the light is pretty "flat" from this image (no shadows or highlights):
After a while I wanted to get a good image of guest instructor Mohamed Azzaoui and my camera meter was averaging the bright image back to grey tones - as it is designed to do, resulting in dull images like the one on the left below. So I changed the camera to manual exposure and corrected the exposure to achieve the one on the right. The same effect could be achieved by telling the camera to over expose by one or two stops.
I then cranked the exposures up to over expose them even more...
Canon 40D, 85.0mm, 1/125s, f/2.2, ISO: 160
Duncan Styles is moving up and down the gym in line with the other black belts while shadow boxing.
Canon 40D, 85.0mm, 1/125s, f/2.2, ISO: 160
Rebecca Styles puts on a wonderful smile for the camera during sparring drills.
Canon 40D, 85.0mm, 1/160s, f/2.5, ISO: 160
Chris Broughton during sparring drills (this image above is correctly exposed).
Canon 40D, 85.0mm, 1/160s, f/2.5, ISO: 320
And for the image above I over exposed it even more to get what the experts call a high key effect. You may or may not like the effect but I then took a whole lot like this which I'll feature over the next few days.
