Shooting a sledding hill
I’ve lived in Columbus nearly all my life. I remember going past the entrance to the Sharon Woods sledding hill as a child. But it seemed that every time we went by when there was snow on the ground, the hill was closed. As a result, until today, I’ve never been to the hill.
After the great wet snow fell yesterday, it seemed like an awesome opportunity to go sledding today. We’d originally planned on a Scout/family outing to Mad River Mountain, but their county had declared a level 3 snow emergency. So after deciding against <judas priest>breakin-the-law</judas priest> in Logan county, and receiving an invite to join friends at the hill, we loaded up the 4WD Pilot and headed out.
I’ve been nursing a sore/injured knee for a week and a half now, so I knew I wasn’t going to be sledding. Instead, I was in rapid-fire-shutterbug mode, shooting over 400 pics in 70 minutes (a frame every 10 seconds, on average!). Ain’t digital great?
The snow was packed solid, and the hill was very fast. Video of some of this stuff would have been very fun. I got to the point where I could predict someone who was going to wipe out by the way they left the top of the hill. OK, this wasn’t all that challenging to foresee with some of them–four teens piled high on a dime-store sled? Oh yeah.
I made triptychs of a number of the wipe-outs, but this one is by far my favorite.
Of course, the best of the shots are in a Flickr set. But I really want you to see them, so I’ve embedded the slide show for the set below. I didn’t go down the hill once. I was having way too much fun shooting.
As for shooting technique, I primarily used the 70-300mm lens, shutter priority, ISO 400, exposure compensation +1. This kept me at a motion stopping 1/800 second most of the time. And as you can tell by the number of shots I took, I also went with the “spray and pray” attitude, with no chimping, except to occasionally check exposure. Except for crop, all of these pics are straight-out-of-camera.








