Some say you have to spend thousands of Euros to get quality action shots. They say you need a 1DX, a D5 or at least a 7DmkII with an ultrafast 70-200 f 2.8 to get what you want. Advertisings claim, we need predictive 4D AF-tracking, 12 frames per second, 200 shots of buffer, ultra high speed flash sync, pocketwizards and other bells and whistles to get a decent photo. And - that's what they don't say - at last seven grand to spend. A few years ago I stupidly believed them. I bought the 70-200 f2.8s, the brickheavy "pro" bodies and was rather pleased with the results and feeling "pro". But times have changed. Along came the knowledge that I neither want to bring that massive gear nor I want to spend the money on it. It just felt not right anymore. (Read more in my article about getting rid of your SLR-gear...)
So today I want to tell you the story behind these photographs, taken with a very different approach: use what you have and know how to use it.
Being a teacher and living in the bavarian alps, my students and I took one day off to go skiing. We went on a small hill, literally behind the schoolyard to where we could walk and didn't have to pay anything for the ski-lift. (And yes, we are the privileged in these kind of activities...)
The children started to build a little kicker and began jumping. After I saw the first airs and my concerns about ending up in hospital had gone, I relaxed and watched the sun rising behind the Kaisergebirge, a mountain ridge between Bavaria, Germany and Tyrol, Austria. I anticipated beautiful sunstars with a high f-stop and looked for something interesting to put in the foreground, assuming to take a landscape shot for the school's website. Meanwhile the boys and girls kept flying in front of my lens, so the foreground problem solved iteself.
Taking the pictures then was quite straight forward and none of the ever so importand tech-specs I needed or even missed. Even if I had have them, I didn't use them. (Ok, a little more frames per second would have been nice, but that's the only thing, I promise!) I stopped down to f16 because I wanted sunstars. Definitely no need for a f2.8 glass. I put the X-A1 in manual focus because of the distance to the action beeing rather the same all the time and depht of field was more than enough at f16. No need for ultrafast AF as well. Due to constant lighting I went with manual exposure too. Shutter was set at 1/1500th to freeze the action, especially to stop the quickly moving snow-particles. Although it was very bright, I had to go up to ISO 3200 to get two stops of overexposure according to the metering, which is not a problem at all with the X-A1. At drive set to high with 5.6 frames per second, I held the trigger and of it went. Velvia simulation was my way to go, because the kids love that oversaturated, punchy look they know from skiing magazines. Highlights were set to -1, noise reduction -1, colour +1 to get an even more mountain magazine look. To emphasize speed and power, a student took a shovel and threw a load of snow between me and the riders - getting this timing right, was by the way the most difficult part of the shooting.
Now, could a "pro" camera / lens combination have done better? Camerawise, lenswise, really? I don't know. Maybe a pro photographer with more time, "pro"-riders, a "pro"-location, a "pro"-helicopter to get there and some dedicated postprocessing (I did none, except in camera cropping) would have gotten this from 85 percent of the possible to 98 percent. This all in all, was a lot of fun, no effort with very pleasing results. Fuji, yes I love you!

So what's the point? First of all I want to remind us as photographers, that creativity should not be limited by the gear we own. It is worth thinking about what our gear can do, not what other gear could do. Most of the time it is not about the gear, it is about us using it. Furthermore it is worth to have a critical look on the advertising. Most of the example pictures that we are shown to demonstrate the advantages of the latest features could have been taken with worse equipment as well.