Sports
One light, one minute, one goal: Variety
Thu Oct 9th - 12:43am
I'll be doing a lot of sports team photos this year for increased coverage of school sports, and the goal I've set myself is to make every one of them different. For most of them I'll be using a single off-camera flash and I'll only have a minute or so to do each picture. But I'm sick of seeing the same old team line-up shots in every paper so I think it's important to strive for originality.
The first two were done yesterday. Now admit it, if these were on a page with a dozen standard line-up shots, you'd look at these first, wouldn't you?
Invergordon Academy skateboarding lessons
Fri Mar 7th - 1:04am
One of my pet projects has landed with a bump on the front page of this week's Ross-shire Journal. I've written before (here) about photographing Invergordon Academy's skateboarding lessons, although after two attempts I still hadn't got the killer action shot that I was looking for. One photo did have something about it though, and with some processing effects it started to look okay.
I'm not intending to make a habit of processing my newspaper pics so heavily. In fact that photo was never intended for print but the editor wanted an action shot and he was happy to use one that had been processed.
This group photo was also used inside the paper, although it appears in black and white which really doesn't do it justice.
Give me more POWER! Or less sun.
Thu Feb 28th - 5:44pm
While the Strobist movement goes from strength to strength, I'm afraid I've gone back to using big strobes for nearly everything nowadays. That can sometimes present a problem when you're working outside but thanks to my willingness to knock on doors, and the generosity of everyone whose door I've knocked on so far, I've always been able to find a power socket to plug an extension cable into.
I've been wanting to shoot skateboarding for ages. If you're into lighting then it's the must-shoot sport. After a few false starts over the last couple of weeks, today we finally had the right weather. The guinea pigs were some of the pupils from Invergordon Academy who are doing skateboarding as part of the P.E. syllabus. (Why did we never have lessons like that when I was at school?!)
To cut a long story short, the day was both a success and a failure. It was a failure in that I only got one shot that was anywhere close to what I wanted. But it was a success in that I've learned how to do the lighting so next time I can concentrate on nailing the action shots.
Here's the one shot that I sort of like a little bit:
And here's the lighting set-up:
Even with both of the 1Kw strobes on full power and the sunlight behind the subject, I still had to shoot at f/22 to make a dent in the ambient. If you look at the full-size version of the action shot then you'll see that there's some ghosting around the subject as the sync speed for the strobes is 1/125s and I wasn't able to stop the aperture down enough to kill the ambient. Now I do have three 500w strobes that I could set-up next time to give me a total of 3.5Kw but I think the better solution, if at all possible, is to do the shoot when it isn't so sunny. Today's shoot was around midday, next week's it's 2-3pm so the light should be less intense by then.
By the way, the reason why one of the strobes is positioned slightly closer to the ramp is simply so its slave cell could see the flash from the other one, which was triggered by Pocket Wizards.
Golspie win SWL Cup 2008
Sun Feb 17th - 5:31pm
Congratulations to Golspie Sutherland Football Club for a spectacular comeback in Saturday's SWL Cup Final at Seaboard Park in Balintore. Muir of Ord dominated the first half and the scoreline was 1-0 to Muir at half time. But then came the turnaround and Golspie's Andrew Keveren scored four goals in the second half to secure a 4-1 victory and the silverware went north.
As an aside, Golspie's victory highlights (again) the problem with some of our local papers relying on spec shooters to get their sports photos. Muir of Ord is a Ross-shire team, so the Ross-shire Journal commissioned photos from this match in case Muir won. Golspie is a Sutherland team, so the Northern Times should have commissioned photos, but didn't. As it turns out, Muir didn't win so the RSJ probably won't use a pic from the match, but they still pay, and that's how it should be. Meanwhile, when any Golspie players or supporters look in their local paper, they won't see any photos of their team's victory because nobody shot the match on spec and the NT hadn't commissioned anyone. This is bad for the team, it's bad for the supporters, it's bad for the sponsor, and it's bad for the newspaper, but that's the way it works round here and I'm not seeing any signs of it changing.
Football from another angle + dramatic team shot
Sat Sep 22nd - 9:30pm
I've mentioned before about shooting football from a low angle but what if you're working with ugly backgrounds? That low angle will only exaggerate them. What you can do instead is get up high and shoot the action from above to use the grass as a background.
The worst football pitch around here for backgrounds is Invergordon. Shoot from one side/end of the pitch and you've got a background of houses, industrial buildings or fairground vehicles that seem to be permanently there. Shoot from the other side/end and you're shooting into the sun. But the Ross Sutherland rugby club pitch is right next door, complete with a large pavilion, and conveniently the pavilion has a flight of steps leading up to the second floor:
Okay so it isn't much but it's better than nothing. The papers don't pay enough to hire a cherry picker for the afternoon. Here's a view of the pitch from the top of the steps. You can see that you really want to be a lot higher than this but any height advantage is better than being at ground level.
Here's an example shot taken from the top of the steps:
Another new thing that I tried today was putting a bit of drama into a team photo. I'm second-guessing the papers here because they keep running the same formulaic team photos every year and I think the time is right to push things a little. I didn't get too adventurous with this one but it certainly has more impact than the usual line-up photos. Also my first time using a voice-activated light stand and thanks to the kind volunteer who did a perfect job.
Low-angle football
Sun Sep 2nd - 6:06pm
I've mentioned before that I was inspired by Peter Read Miller to try photographing football from a low-angle, as he recommended doing for American football.
I tried it again yesterday for a full game and I now think this is definitely worth pursuing. It's going to be tricky to do it in bad weather because you have to lie down, so if you see me turning up at a football game in leathers then it will be for purely practical reasons!
The ideal camera position is around 10 inches off the ground. Any lower than that and the grass in the foreground becomes a blurry mush.
I find that shots from this angle are best presented in a wide format. No doubt they'll be cropped in the newspaper but at least I can post the wide versions here. What would really make one of these shots work would be if the action happened with lots of other players around, to fill the wide frame. Having some stadium seating in the background wouldn't hurt either.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the best action for this angle is very close to you, so you've got to be ready to grab the shot and then get out of the way.
Balintore vs Brora Rangers
Fri Aug 3rd - 9:54pm
This week's football pics didn't turn out quite how I thought they would. The Balintore 2007/08 season team pic was in the North Star as expected, but for some reason the John O'Groat Journal didn't use the Brora Rangers team pic. And none of the action pics from the Balintore vs Brora pre-season friendly were in the Ross-shire Journal although they did use the Inver team pic from last week's Seaboard Cup final.
Ross County vs Caledonian Thistle
Sun Jul 29th - 11:07am
Some pics from yesterday's pre-season friendly between Ross County and Caledonian Thistle at Victoria Park in Dingwall.
This was the first time in what must be over a year that I shot a football match with two cameras, one with a 70-200mm f/2.8 and one with a 300mm f/2.8 + 1.4 extender. It paid off with the shot of Andrew Barrowman scoring County's goal which I was able to get with the shorter range of the zoom.
County's new manager Dick Campbell is a photographer's dream. He stays right at the side of the pitch the whole time, frequently shouting to players and giving directions. Plus the guy just looks like your classic football hard man. (Okay, maybe not in the second pic, but usually he does.) He seems like a nice bloke too. I've briefly met him a couple of times now and he can obviously tell that I'm the new kid on the block, so he tones down the gruff. Gotta respect that.
Based on my results from this match (which I'm happy with) and my results from previous matches (which I wasn't happy with) here's what I'd suggest for covering a football match with a two-camera set-up:
- Sit about 1/3 of the way along one side of the pitch. If you're looking for photos of one particular team then sit closer to the opposing team's goal.
- Use the camera with your long lens to cover the further half of the pitch, and the distant side of the nearer half. You'll have good range for the opposing team's goals and you'll have the players in 'your' team facing you.
- When the action comes into the near half, switch to the cam with your zoom. Most of the action you care about in this half will be around the goals.
What would make this set-up really good would be if the zooms had focus-stop buttons on them like the long teles, but you can get around that by using the camera's AE-lock button for focus (which a lot of football shooters do anyway) or you can switch to one-shot focus mode which is what I ended up doing.
Here's a rough illustration of the set-up described above:
Also for about 10 minutes at the end of this match I tried something that I've been meaning to do for ages but kept forgetting. I switched from using only the centre focus point to using all 45 focus points, basically putting the camera into full do-all-the-focusing-for-me mode. Results were encouraging. Yes there was a lot of focus jumping when the action was far away, but you need to balance that with the advantage of shooting much closer action because you don't need to keep the middle of the frame over one player. I'm a sucker for in-your-face action so I'll probably try shooting this way for at least one half of the match next time.
Here's a sample frame. Lousy shot of course but it's just an extreme example to illustrate the point. The players were 15-20 feet away from me at an effective focal length of 546mm. If I'd been using the centre focus point (marked 'X') it may have snapped the focus onto the background at this point. Now imagine if a split second later the players had moved closer together and the ball had bounced up into frame. That would have been a great shot and I'd have missed it. There's definitely a case to be made for using auto-select focusing.
The next must-have football shot (part 2)
Fri Jul 27th - 6:48am
My quest for the next must-have football shot took another step forward last night with this effort from the Balintore vs Brora Rangers friendly. Just a split second off on the timing as the ball isn't quite touching his head. Here's the full frame and a possible crop. Note the motion blur on the ball. Shot at 1/500s. I do love a bit of motion blur in football shots, so long as the faces are sharp. Next match I think I'm going to shoot at 1/320s as nearly all shots at that shutter speed still have the players sharp but you get more motion blur on the ball.
The next must-have football shot
Mon Jul 23rd - 2:05am
I've mentioned before that there are three must-have football shots, but now I'm trying to get another one. It's not even a shot that I particularly like, I'm just frustrated that it's so difficult! Basically it's the standard shot of two midfield players jumping up to intercept a long kick from the goalie. You want at least one of them making contact with the ball, and both faces visible. Respect to the guys who usually cover Ross County matches (Trevor Martin and Ken Macpherson) who get these shots on a regular basis, as this is the closest I've got so far…
One thing that's pretty cool about this photo is the writing on the ball. The photo is from the Seaboard Cup final and by pure luck you can read that on the ball.
