Leaping Monk

[Manfred M]

This airborne monk is dancing at a festival at the Gangteng Monastery in Western Bhutan. A few drops of rain in the air add to the atmosphere...

[Shadowman]

Nice shot.

[RBSinTo]

Manfred,
Well done to get the subject airborne and looking so animated.
Minor nits are the verticals which need to be straightened, and perhaps even the excessive depth of field, although one can argue that the background adds to the story.
I am curious about what camera this was taken with as there seem to be intermittent sections of "perforations" in the outline of the subject.
Robert

[Manfred M]

1. The monastery was built in the 1600s and the verticals were definitely not completely straight. That is pretty common in older construction, especially in developing countries. I did look at correcting for perspective distortion, but given that this would also distort the subject, I chose not to do this.

2. The lens is a f/4 - 5.6 14-140mm lens on a Panasonic GX7 (mFT camera; 2x crop factor). I show a f/4.7 aperture at a 25mm focal length, so the lens was shot wide open (other parameters ISO 800 and 1/1000th sec shutter speed to freeze the motion). The DoF is as shallow as I could get. That is the downside of shooting crop sensor cameras; one can't get a shallow DoF as easily as with a FF. The reason I took that particular camera for the trip is that we were backpacking for 2 months, so I had a 50 litre backpack as my only piece of luggage. Size and weight were my main concerns in choosing the gear I had along. Just as an aside; contrast detect focus is not great for action shots like this one, it is far too slow to get shots like this reliably.

3. The "perforations" are back-lit drops of rain. It was raining at the time.

[just me]

This airborne monk is dancing at a festival at the Gangteng Monastery in Western Bhutan. A few drops of rain in the air add to the atmosphere...

From me just one word about this image : WOW !!!!!!!

Griddi.....