Pixiq

Thanks Justin for your thoughtful comments not only on this gallery but my other article about the Biggest Mistake With Digital Photography.
To answer your questions:
== I shot about 300 photos over about a 3 hour period. And choosing the best ones, narrowing it down to just 25, was quite a task as these all looked quite good to me. I made the selection in part to present a range of different points of view. Since many good pictures repeated the same basic shot, I eliminated the ones that repeated. Overall I wanted to give a sense, a feeling, for the event as if you had walked around the floor and looked at it from different angles, which in fact I did. While this resulted in a much lower ratio of pictures taken to pictures displayed than I recommended in Biggest Mistake article, in this case just about every picture worked -- there were few duds.
== I shot these using only subject movement but no camera movement and used wide fixed manual zone focusing (meaning I knew by the f/stop what the range of sharp focus was) which is why the background is somewhat clear. Adding camera movement might have been worth doing which would blur the background but which is much much harder to control. And when I shot these photos almost ten years ago, I did not have the knowledge or the skill to do that -- which I do today.
Further -- in a fast moving situation, it is almost impossible to constantly change the focus -- as the people often move away by the time the new focus is set. And the more critical the focus (i.e., a low f/number), the more difficult it is to photograph when people move beyond the point of focus. And I have found in dark light, automatic focus (at least with this camera) often messed up.