World Indoor Athletic Championships

I'd bought a ticket earlier in the week to the IAAF World Indoor Athletics Championships being held in Birmingham.  Despite the conditions, the train journey was only slightly delayed and I got in with plenty of time to spare for the morning session.  I can only remember Birmingham being so snow bound on one previous occasion.

We had a great three hours of competition, with plenty of action including the heptathlon (for men) and pentathlon (for women) starting during the session.  We also had the heats of the 60 metres for women, men's and women's 400 metres heats and the men's 3,000 metres.  Photography was interesting, with high ISO a must and the difficulty of getting enough shutter speed to freeze action.  In the end I also decided to try something different so purposefully blurred the athlete with a slow shutter speed.  I've added a couple of extras, including Katarina Johnson Thompson putting up the best height in the high jump.

Blip Community has issued a challenge to mark International Women's Day next week, so I've tagged this entry with 'CBWomensDay' so I can join in. 

**Update**


I was sure the original had a colour cast on it, so I've replaced the image after using a nifty little Photoshop trick I learnt recently.  You take the image and duplicate it on a new layer.  You then apply an average blur filter.  You invert that layer (Ctrl/cmd I).  Now you change the blend mode to colour and reduce the opacity until you are happy with the resultant image.  It was obvious that I had a magenta cast on the original and I'm much happier with the updated image.