This week the shuttlecocks are flying in Wembley Arena at the World Badminton Championships which is serving as an unofficial test event for next years Olympic event. This is not an easy event to photograph as the lighting is somewhat patchy and with black backgrounds almost impossible to get a good shot of any player in dark clothing.

Pui Yin Yip (HNK), World Badminton Championships, Wembley Arena London, England, Photo by: Peter Llewellyn

Nikon D3s, AFS Zoom Nikkor 80 – 200 f2.8, at 80mm
1/1250th @ f2.8, ISO 3200

Lot’s of additional tweaking in Aperture for this one.

You need to keep the shutter speed at least 1/1000th or better to freeze the action in this sport as the racket head moves with enormous speed. Once again the high ISO capabilities of the Nikon D3 cameras score heavily. I can remember way back photographing Badminton at the All England Championships in this same venue when we were using tungsten balanced film at 160 ASA and pushing it two stops to achieve 640. You had to be sure to fire the shutter at the exact end of the backswing to ensure that the racket head was almost completely stationary to be able to freeze it – those were the days! And people ask me if I would ever want to return to the days of film – definitely not, we have many more opportunities available to us today.

Kevin Cordon (GUA), World Badminton Championships, Wembley Arena London, England, Photo by: Peter Llewellyn

Nikon D3s, AFS Zoom Nikkor 200 – 400 f4, at 360mm
1/1000th @ f4, ISO 3200
This is an image was shot from the top row of the stands, one of the positions that will be available to photographers at Games time next year.

This is a sport dominated by the Asian countries with a small scattering of Europeans. Many finals are all Chinese affairs and I am sure it will be the same way next year.

Dan Lin (CHN)
, World Badminton Championships, Wembley Arena London, England, Photo by: Peter Llewellyn

Nikon D3s, AFS Zoom Nikkor 80 – 200 f2.8, at 80mm
1/1250th @ f2.8, ISO 2000

And now for something different. As I was somewhat disappointed with the quality of ‘straight’ sports images I was getting I decided to experiment a little. In the image above I set the D3 to shoot 4 images on the same frame.

Are you interested in learning how to take images such as those seen on the blog in recent weeks? Watch out for announcements coming soon on formal sports photography workshops where you will get the opportunity to learn all these techniques and more on three-day workshops to be led my myself and a couple of the world’s best known sports shooters.

Peter

The finals are being dominated by the Chinese