And another few sports tips

Since I just got back from shooting a junior Lacrosse game, here’s another few quick tips.

And they do not apply just to Lacrosse!

  • As said yesterday: look for action and emotion.
  • If you are shooting through Plexiglas, shoot straight through it and get close to it. You may need to bend down to minimize reflections from behind you.
  • Bring a soft cloth to clean that Plexiglas.
  • Avoid shooting from the penalty box in pro games of hockey and lacrosse. In junior games you may be able to get away with it without getting hit by projectiles. Safety first, though…
  • Bring bottled water and a snack.
  • Indoors, shoot manual. Tonight I shot at 1600 ISO, f/2.8, 1/320th second. Pretty typical values for an arena.
  • And as also said yesterday: shoot a lot. It took me 400+ shots to get enough good ones: I aim to submit 6-10 images.

Here’s one I like:

Shooting Rugby

I have never shot Rugby before, so I thought I would enjoy this morning’s newspaper shoot, a high school rugby game. And I did.

Here’s a shot. Of course it is one that I did not send to the newspaper, since I only just shot this and the paper is not out yet, and it is bad practice to trump your own customers. Click for larger:

For Rugby I used the 70-200 2.8IS L lens on the Canon 1D Mark IV.

I set the camera to continuous focus (“AI Servo”) and used a custom setting to give preference to tracking, not to refocusing on objects that appear in between. I used one focus point, with expansion to surrounding point.

The camera produced many sharp shots – most of them by far, so I was more than impressed with this first sports shoot with the Mark IV.

But my main learning was about the sport itself. Here’s what I learned:

  1. The sidelines are a great place to be.
  2. The sun needs to be behind the photographer on a bright day – and pay attention to where it falls onto the subjects (face is better than back of head!)
  3. 70-200 is a great lens for this sport
  4. Get action shots. There’s not much action in a school game – in that sense it is like football or cricket: periods of boredom with the odd burst of action.
  5. Get emotion.
  6. Get colours.
  7. Use fast shutter speeds (I used 200 ISO with the camera in aperture mode and set to f/2.8 mostly – leading to 1/3000th second shutter speeds).
  8. Get the action while you can – 15 minutes times two with only occasional action is no guarantee of a shot/

Oh, and the team in the red jerseys won by a 10-0 margin, so you can see why the others were very determined to stop that ball.

Let there be light

..and let it be managed.

I have talked about this many times before, and I will do it again. When you add light, and manage it, massage it, and work with i, you get drama, cheerfulness, whatever you like. So when you make the light, you make the mood.

Case in point. In the model shoot I did Monday on Toronto Island, here’s the light the way it might look to a casual observer, and the way it might appear in a properly exposed photo:

MVW_2600

Fine. Nice. Pretty young lady (Miss Halton, incidentally) on the beach.

Now let’s work with that. That background is a bit bland to my taste, so let’s darken it. The colours on the model are OK but I’d like them to stand out more.I want drama, and I want the model to stand out, not to be just a thing on a beach.

So first I turn down the ambient exposure. Two stops.That will make light blue into dark dramatic blue. Then I add a flash, on a light stand – shot through an umbrella to get soft light.  I fire that from my on-camera flash using E-TTL II IR technology. I turn the flash up or down as needed.

I now get the result I had in mind.

MVW_2601

That’s better.

And more importantly: that’s entirely different. And that is the photographer’s task, to make things the way he or she wants them. You can say you like, or you don’t like – but you can’t say it isn’t different!

How I rate photos in Lightroom

It occurs to me that it may be helpful to share my “rating”-workflow in Lightroom. I go through the following sequence:

  1. Import everything as 2 stars
  2. Go to grid view and step through them, and reject any that are technically bad (e.g. out of focus or badly exposed, or the subject is blinking). They get an “X” marking. I exclude X from my view.
  3. Go through them again and rate any that “could possibly be used” as 3.
  4. Go through the threes again and rate any that are “great in this shoot” as 4.
  5. Go through the fours again and give any that are “great and can be used even outside this shoot as portfolio shots” a five rating.
  6. Then I select just the 4 and 5 stars rate them all as PICK.
  7. Then I step through the 3 stars and decide with of them I want to use; I rate those as PICK also.
  8. Then I check for doubles and unpick those.
  9. Then I do any post on my picks.

Done.

Here’s a couple of (unedited)  4-star images from yesterday’s Toronto Island model shoot:

MVW_2386-2

MVW_2360

(70-200 f/2.8 IS lens on 1D MkIII, manual exposure -2 stops from ambient and key flash though umbrella, fill flash on camera.)