Personal Journey and Adventures of Nina

A great meet for young swimmers as the qualifying times are very generous. It's lovely watching the high fives all around for the little medal winners!  It's also a good meet for the older kids chasing State and Metro times.. AND the relays are a BLAST! You can see the rest of the photos on my swim site. Just click here .

Because my Flash based website is just SO slow, I decided to launch a new website with Photoshelter to handle the large number of orders coming in for swim action photo's from various meets.  So far, so good. There are a couple of improvements that I would like to see made in the near future but on the whole, I'm pretty impressed. Thank you to all my clients who happily gave me feedback regarding the previous site. It helps to know when you're doing something wrong as well as when you get it right! Here is the link to the new site. It is also available from the splash page on www.ninabeilby.com .

The start of the short course season brings groups of swimmers from around the area aiming to make personal best times for State and Metro which are only weeks away. For me it meant the first time using my Canon Mark IV. I had a few adjustments to make but then got the hang of the amazing rapid fire...a far sight quicker than the Mark II. In addition to the 10 fps, I liked the extra zoom. The 300mm lens is just too bulky for me so it's a nice compromise to stick the 70-200mm on the 1.3x sensor. The lighting at SOPAC is all but non existent. At one stage I was feeling ready to sleep it was that dark. Around 12800 ISO dark. These challenges are sent to try us!

This was a large and long meet with lots of swim clubs in attendance. Many swimmers were trying to beat their personal best times in order to qualify for the upcoming Metro Championships. Don't miss the opportunity to get some of these wonderful images for your club or yourself. They are available in jpeg or print format. Just email me for the password.

Matthew Abood....Intense Focus SMNE (Sydney Metro North East) hosted it's popular Summer Sprint Qualifying Meet, this past weekend. A District meet attended by 9 year olds upwards who are here with the hope of making some personal best times and to get in some race practice before the upcoming school swim carnivals.  To the delight of these swimmers and spectators, also here to race were Olympians and Australian Champions, Eamon Sullivan, Geoff Huegill, Matt Abood & Andrew Abood.  The focus and preparation was intense. You can see Matt running the race through his head stroke by stroke. I had briefly met Matt at Lane Cove Swim Club' s recent 50th birthday celebrations. He is a kind and gracious man taking time out in between races to sign the T-shirts of all the awestruck kids. Eamon Sullivan getting ready to race. The crowd gathers to watch the 100m Free Andrew Abood Abood Brothers before the 50m Free Geoff Huegill preparing for the 50m

Swim photography is not just about capturing the strokes, although that is fun too. For me, I like to capture moments inside and outside the pool. The tension as a team mate is swimming a close race. Sheer joy or occasionally disappointment after a tough swim. This weekend, I am the official photographer for the SMNE Speedo Sprints. A big challenge because it is an indoor venue and the light is low.  Sometimes the swimmers didn't breathe, especially in the 50's. Other times they breathed away from me.  There were no breaks. Just 8 hours of walking around the pool taking shots. I don't really have a sports camera, so I had to rely on timing. My 200mm lens meant that I could only shoot 4 lanes...I really needed two of me! My memory cards filled up quickly, (approx 40GB) even with reviewing and deleting. I was able to download a card on to my portable hard drive whilst I filled the next card but I was nervous deleting the images from the card so that I cou

Another successful meet for the Lane Cove Swim Club. We really enjoy these SMNE meets as they are well organized, they combine the little and big swimmers and they are generally on time...it also was great that we won the door prize - a money tree full of scratch-it tickets. Here are some of the highlights: