Monday, June 21, 2010 first day of summer and my dad’s birthday

This afternoon Susan and I visited with the Lill's. I biked down. On the return trip I passed many young teenagers on skateboards going along the bike path. I discovered they were headed to the rink in Lincoln Park just north of Lawrence Ave. in celebration of National Skateboard day. There was a mob of the dedicated groupies there along with some participants in a competition that I grabbed some shots. Very difficult since although the Canon S90 is a fabulous camera it is not intended for this sort of thing. It has a shutter lag that makes it impossible to shoot a decisive moment. Even many DSLRs have shutter lags. In addition, although I have a 8GB class 6 SDHC card, it is not very fast at buffering, so when I shot multiple sequence shots, they all missed. I finally pushed the shutter ahead of the peak moment and managed to capture a few frames that hit the action right on. All the time avoiding having the skater land on me, which happened almost three times anyway – and that doesn’t count the skateboard!