QUAC Ski-n-Swim 2011

QUAC hosted their annual Ski-n-Swim weekend in Salt Lake City and Park City and I was there to photograph most of it. I don’t ski so I didn’t go photograph the skiing portion. However, I was there to photograph the opening social, the swim meet, water polo, and closing social at JAM. Lots of photos! You can find all of them at my SmugMug gallery.

And the Ski-n-Swim is always a reminder that I need to get in shape and back in the pool. QUAC is a great organization that is run by its members and is totally volunteer based. They welcome people of all swimming abilities and backgrounds. So if you are gay, straight, lesbian, bi, transgender, transexual, queer, questioning, bored, you need to come to QUAC. There is swimming, water polo, some diving, there are even people who participate in triathlons!

The opening social was held at Frida’s Bistro in Salt Lake City. It is the location where all the RICO burritos are made.

After the opening social everyone went to JAM for a night of dancing and watching Morgan McMichaels perform. Morgan was on season 2 of Ru Paul’s drag race and she was fierce in her performances.

I was nervous to photograph the swim meet – this was the first sporting event I have photographed entirely with Canon camera gear. My old Nikon D300 was awesome with sports photography and focusing quickly. The Canon cameras that I have are slower focusing and are geared more for portraits, weddings, and product photography. The frame right isn’t great and the focus is slower. However, I was able to get some great photographs. I even spent part of the event photographing with a tilt shift lens and my 85mm f/1.2 – I tried to get some great candid portraits. I used natural light because of flash restrictions for swim meets. I didn’t want to cause a false start.

It wouldn’t be a swim meet without one gratuitous photograph of someone’s back end. Just saying. I will have to get some photos of some female badonkadonk next year.

I wish I could have zoomed out a bit more for this photograph and not cut off the hands and feet – but I was all the way back and the lens was too long in focal length. This happened so quickly that I wouldn’t have been able to switch cameras either. Sometimes you live with what you photograph – but I still find the photograph awesome.

I pulled out my tilt shift lens for this photograph – that lens will need some practice. I had to do some photoshopping to get the right exposure.

I was pushing my camera and the 85mm to its limit when I was taking these photographs for Jeff. He wanted a few butterfly photographs and I should have had my 70-200mm instead but after a few tries we were able to get a few salvaged.

I wasn’t able to hang out too long for water polo. It was held at a different location and I had a wedding to go photograph at 2:30pm. I had some fun with my off camera lighting setup.