Why...

...are gymnastics shows always held in semi-darkness?

Today was H's Christmas gymnastics show. The whole of the Eclipse team were fantastic and hats off to Terry, the head coach, and his team for getting the kids to an unbelievably high standard :-)

The lighting conditions pushed my camera to the max. Why oh why can't they turn the lights on at these events!? Even at 6400 ISO I couldn't get shutter speeds of more than 1/20 - 1/30. I needed a bigger aperture but my 50mm hadn't got the reach as we were set back from the action.

Never mind. I switched to manual and jiggled things a bit so I shot under-exposed images at slightly higher speeds to see if I could rescue them in RAW...nothing ventured, nothing gained eh?

Don't look at these too closely but I really had to put up some images of my bouncy boy. I was so immensely proud of him and his friends that the crappy quality images stay as a memory of a fab Christmas show :-))

And the coaches all dress as snowmen doing their own routine was the highlight of my day :-)

And Noah, who went with his daddy and H this morning was so well behaved that I had several offers to adopt him. He crashed out in the car on the way home. I let him have an hour but I'd better get him up now!

Final of Strictly tonight...wonder who will win?