Picture of the Week

A once-a-week look back at some of my favorite photos.

Flying in the Triple Jump (Apr 2022)

I've always found the Triple Jump to be one of the most difficult track events to photograph. It's hard to capture the essence of the Triple Jump in a single photo. What I'd like to do is shoot a sequence of photos that could be spliced together to show the athlete's progress along the track through the various stages of the jump, but there's always too many people standing along the track for that to be possible.

In 2022 however, the event at our local high school track meet was run with the competitors running towards the grandstand, so I climbed up into the grandstand to find a viewpoint where I was shooting down along the length of the track... something I had never tried before. The result was this shot of a Smoky Valley High School girl soaring through the air above the track; easily the best Triple Jump shot I've ever taken.

Pentax K-S1
SMC Pentax FA* 200mm f/2.8
ISO 140 | 1/500 sec, f/5.6