Parkour - By Maik Scharfscheer, Leica Photographer

 

Parkour, by Reed A. George

Nikon F2SB

 

I've recently gotten into photographing the sport of parkour. These urban acrobats are excellent photographic subjects, and I've just started to scratch the surface.

 

I found an interesting post on the Leica Camera Blog about photographer Maik Scharfscheer, who made a series of photographs of a parkour practitioner in the city of Marrakesh. (Click Here) to see the post.

 

As you can see above, my first session shooting parkour was with a manual Nikon film SLR. My inclination, as with most photographers I'm sure, is to use a fast camera for this subject, something like a DSLR. In fact, I have now used my Nikon Df for that purpose. But, I've also been playing with Micro 4/3 (using a fisheye lens), and most recently with a Zeiss SW 35mm camera with a Voigtlander 12mm f5.6 lens. This sport works so well with wide angle lenses.

 

So, in some ways, I'm taking an approach similar to Scharfscheer, who chose to shoot parkour with a Leica, carefully selecting his moments rather than capturing high speed sequences with a DSLR.

 

That said, I captured some pretty cool sequences today at a parkour event with my Nikon Df. As I said, I'm trying a variety of approaches to develop my own look at this exciting sport. I'll share more parkour images in the near future.

 

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