Capoeira

Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art that combines fighting moves with dance, music, and acrobatics. The moves are very smooth. The most common attacks are various circular kicks.

Because most kicks are circular, there is a lot of body rotation around the center of gravity. This makes Capoeira practitioners appear a bit slow, for martial artists. They are not. If you look at how fast the feet move, well, let's just say these pictures are all shot at 1/1600s. If there had been more light, I would have shot at an even shorter shutter time.

The high jumps are impressive. To capture them, I set the camera to shoot high speed bursts.

I also switched from RAW to JPEG format. The drawback is that I loose a bit of information, so I can't bring out details in shadows, nor reduce highlights as well as I could with a RAW picture.

The advantage is that the pictures are much smaller, so I can shoot long bursts without the camera's memory buffer filling up.

Another advantage is that the pictures require less storage space. I shot about 600 pictures in 20 minutes.

It helps if you start young, of course.

If you want to look at more Capoeira pictures, have a look at my Capoeira Picasa album.