The Graduation on Television – Austin, Texas

I’m not sure if the graduation was televised or recorded, but they did a great job on the video feed to the jumbo screens. The Frank Erwin Center on the University of Texas campus is large enough that people in the back would need binoculars to find their kids. This is one of at least three television cameras they used to capture the event.

I mentioned yesterday that I borrowed some special lenses for my son’s high school graduation ceremony. Specifically, the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro and the 300mm f4 Pro. Here’s a fun and atypical image of the graduates, shot with Olympus PEN-F and the 300mm f4. That’s 600mm at a full frame 35mm equivalent.

These multi purpose venues aren’t particularly optimal for photography with their dim lighting. They’re perfectly fine for people but cameras always need more light than you would expect. And as an enthusiast, I’m always trying to make those perfect shots. No pinch and zoom smartphone pictures for me.

Here, I shot this at ISO 3200 at 1/25 of a second. That’s more than 4 stops of image stabilization. The 300mm f4 pro has built-in lens stabilization and I think, but I’m not sure, it uses Sync IS to work in conjunction with the camera’s built-in stabilization. Either way, it was easy to make a photo like this. Amazingly, I was shooting with a 600mm equivalent lens without worrying about shutter speeds.