Strike!

Our daughter and son-in-law are both avid bowlers and their local bowling alley hosts open holiday meals at Easter and Thanksgiving. We enjoy the variety of food that people bring and we have participated in these holiday meals many times. While there, I thought it would be interesting to capture action photos of a bowling ball hitting the pins for a strike.

I initially took flash photos with my Canon EOS 77D which, with its focal plane shutter, cannot take many images rapidly. I did get one good photo of the bowling ball hitting the pins for a strike on that occasion.

More recently I did this again with my new Canon EOS R7 mirrorless camera, which will take high speed bursts of images with its electronic shutter. For details about how these photos were taken, please see the Technical Information section, below.

The featured image is one exposure taken from one burst and there are two videos below of that burst – the first one is real time and the second one is a 20-second slow-motion video to show the ball and pin action.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Golden Lanes Bowling Alley and Restaurant in Petersburg, West Virginia and the Thorne family, its owners who allowed these photographs to be taken. I especially want to thank Troy, our son-in-law who can consistently bowl strikes which makes it easier for me to capture action photographs.

https://youtu.be/WDpNvyrvm50

https://youtu.be/WDpNvyrvm50

Additional Images

These four photographs were taken of three different bowling strikes. Additional details are on the Technical Information section below.

Technical Information

On my first attempt, I took flash photos with my Canon EOS 77D which can take six exposures per second with its focal plane shutter. At a low power setting, the flash will fire faster than six times per second. I did get one good photo of the bowling ball hitting the pins for a strike on that occasion, which is Strike! (#1), the last image in the gallery above.

More recently I did this again with my new Canon EOS R7 mirrorless camera, which will take bursts of 30 frames per second with its electronic shutter. This burst mode also has a pre-shooting option, which captures ½ second of the burst before the shutter is fully depressed, compensating for the photographer’s reaction time in an action situation. I took these images with the available light over the pins in the bowling alley – I misread the camera settings and these images are about 4 f-stops underexposed. I did not expect to recover as much detail as there is in these photographs. The first three images in the gallery above were from two of these bursts.

Additional Information

Facebook: Golden Lanes Bowling Alley and Restaurant