The theme of May’s Photo of the Month is skate! Coincidentally, the pictures were taken exactly one year ago, in May 2025, and only now are being published.
All shots were made in manual mode with the Yashica 50mm lens, starting at the sunset and stopped after dark.
Given the darkening, I decided to leave the photos in chronologic order.
It was hard to balance the depth of field to get enough light in to capture the riders without a blur and in focus. Before the sun set, I could even get some results, but even so it was hard and I realized I still need to train a lot.
I also noticed something interesting about this lens. It looks like it leaves a certain “aura” around moving objects against light or well lit.
In some pictures I abused the contrast to counter the blur of the moving subjects, as to try to save a few more clicks. It is known that sometimes less is more, but here they were nice shots.
Here it starts to darken…
Another hard point of this rehearsal was the estrangement in being watched. Yes, although I was there to watch the skaters, some people watching engaged in smalltalk with me in a nice way and all, but I feel so amateur that I was a bit embarrassed to stay there taking pictures.
From here onwards we can consider it a night…
A streetlight above the skatepark ended up making this light effect in the pictures. As I didn’t have a parasol and didn’t think of improvising something, I ended up trying to leverage the effect.
Noise also ended up high due to the low light.
As I left home only with the Yashica, I had the objective of getting a vintage, retro feeling. Up to you to judge whether I got close…
And this is the end of this innovative rehearsal for Photo of the Month standards. Hope you enjoyed, see you!