I tried my hand at action photography for the first time on Sunday at the Crown International Dance Competition, which is the biggest one day dance competition in Australia. Many styles are performed — all the dancesport (latin, ballroom, New Vogue), plus the theatrical events (hiphop, jazz dance, ballet, modern expressive, tap, theatrical, break dancing).

I danced a theatrical piece at about 10 AM, and two hiphop pieces at around 8 or 9 PM. In between, I took some photos. It took me half an hour of random snapping for me to get an idea of the settings I needed to use.

Unfortunately, many of the photos are quite grainy because I boosted the ISO to 400, 800, even 1600 in some cases. ‘This is ridiculous,’ I thought a few times. ‘The ISO is as high as it gets, aperture as wide as possible but it’s still blurry. What are you meant to do?’

Then I looked around and all the other people with the big cameras had mega flashes. Ah! I geddit.

So if you’re interested in my first attempt at sports photography or would like to see the story of a dance competition played out in pictures, have a look at my Flickr Crown International album.