My camera is pretty nice in some ways, but it was not designed for sports photography at all, much less indoor sports photography in an environment where I cannot use a flash. It has a sports mode, but it's locked at 1/60 of a second, which means someone wasn't really thinking when they designed it.

The championships lasted four days, from Wednesday, August 12 through Saturday, August 15, and my photography got better as the days progressed.

One main problem is that a photo can look good on the small camera monitor, only showing its flaws later on a computer screen, which is too late to make adjustments for that day's events. I didn't learn until the end of Day 1 that my shutter speed was too slow. I sped it up for Day 2, but it was still too slow; I didn't succeed in freezing action until Day 3.

Another problem is that there is a delay between picture-taking and picture-recording, as with most digital cameras. To overcome this, I tried to anticipate what a gymnast would do about one second ahead of time, but this is not a skill I possess.

I could not count how many gorgeous shots I lost because the rapport between me and my camera is not smooth. I could set the camera at ISO 1600 (vital for fast indoor photography), but neither this setting nor the zoom setting is saved when I turn the camera off (which I must do to save power), and resetting them both takes precious seconds.

Focusing was a problem, too. I sometimes lost a wonderful shot because the camera suddenly decided it needed to autofocus a second time. I tried to get around this problem by pre-setting the focus to a certain apparatus, such as the balance beam, then turning off the auto-focus. But then I would forget that the auto-focus was off because things happen so fast, and I would discover that I had lost the most gorgeous shot on floor exercise because the focus was still set to the balance beam and I hadn't reset it.

I ultimately used another feature of the camera to solve most of my timing problems. I set it to a rapid-fire mode which takes 5 photos in one second, as long as I keep my finger on the button. However, this mode would also need to be reset every time I turned the camera on, which would take another couple of seconds. I would also sometimes need to turn this setting off temporarily, then lose a gorgeous shot by forgetting to turn it back on.

There were a few times when I had to restrain myself from shouting out curse words, because I got very frustrated. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried, I kept forgetting one of my many settings. I would remember the ISO, but forget the rapid-fire setting. I would remember to switch auto-focus back on, but forget the ISO. I would lower the shutter speed to take photos of gymnasts standing by the wall, then forget to make it faster when I switched back to action shots. I would get everything right, but the camera would auto-focus a second time.

All of this is in addition to all the shots I missed when I got everything right and the camera cooperated, but the gymnast was facing the wrong way or I didn't frame the shot well enough.

However, I still managed to get some nice shots. That happens when you take a few thousand.

I was sitting on the second row, which is too low, because people walking in front of me on the podium would also ruin some shots. My seat was about equidistant between the floor exercise and the balance beam/pommel horse area, so most of my shots are of balance beam, pommel horse, still rings, and floor exercise. The high bar, parallel bars, and uneven bars were further away, so I have fewer of those. I hardly took any photos of vault, and the few I did take are not very good.

The photos from the first two days have higher resolution and are brighter, but they are more blurry. The photos from the final two days freeze action much better, but are noticeably grainier and a bit darker.

I didn't bother naming anyone in the photos. You either already know who they are or it doesn't matter that much.