Soccer

Nikon D7000, 150mm (150-500), 1/800, f/9, ISO 400, cropped

As long as I have the State Fair series disrupted for sports, I might as well post some soccer shots. The afternoon was baking hot when I shot these from the sidelines of KCKCC’s home opener, so if I get too far into October before posting them I fear they’ll be badly out of season.

The picture at the top of this post is sports photography with all the elements in place. Details are clear. Framing is good. Motion is frozen. Body posture and facial expression tell a dramatic story.

Of course it’s easy to set up a shot like this when you know pretty much precisely what’s going to happen, where it’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen. Because sports such as soccer are generally more free flowing, you have to stay loose (frequently adjusting zoom and focus), look for good moments and shoot lots of pictures.

Here’s an example of a good moment captured without a lot of careful set-up:

Nikon D7000, 150mm (150-500), 1/800, f/7.1, ISO 400, cropped

For all their fun, sports tend to be serious business. However, every once in awhile you can catch some humor:

Nikon D7000, 400mm (150-500), 1/125, f/9, ISO 100, cropped

The main subject in this shot was doing some warm-up jumps, but his body posture and the apparent “reactions” to it come across as funny.

And of course a warning: when photographing sports, shutter speed is absolutely crucial. Compare the kick and head shots above with this picture taken earlier in the afternoon:

Nikon D7000, 150mm (150-500), 1/125, f/10, ISO 100, cropped

The difference in shutter speed is a small fraction of a second, but what a difference it makes in motion blur and the story you tell with your picture.

I should also mention that this week we added the very first actual instructional slide show to The Photographer’s Sketchbook web site. It’s an introduction to sketching color.

Ethnic Fest 2013

Nikon D7000, 200mm (28-200), 1/60, f/5.6, ISO 640, adjusted

Last Saturday I took some shots at the college’s annual Ethnic Festival. I try to time the Saturday photography seminar I teach once a semester to coincide with an event like this with some good photo opportunities. This year we missed the dance groups, so photogenic moments were fewer and farther between.

The one thing I forgot from last year was that the light in the field house is deceptively bad. It looks okay to the eye, but it’s dim enough to make a camera struggle. The shot at the top of this post was far too dark straight out of the camera:

Nikon D7000, 200mm (28-200), 1/60, f/5.6, ISO 640

And that was at a relatively slow, 60 shutter. Fortunately, fixing that particular picture was an easy level adjustment in Photoshop.

When I slowed it down further, however, the lighting got better but other problems cropped up. A 30 shutter is about as slow as I can go and not pick up camera vibration. And even then, I have to concentrate on holding the camera still. If I pay attention to my grip, I end up only with motion from the subject (though at this slow speed even that will show up in the picture):

Nikon D7000, 200mm (28-200), 1/30, f/5.6, ISO 1000

But if I’m not careful, the camera moves and the whole picture gets messed up:

Nikon D7000, 200mm (28-200), 1/30, f/5.6, ISO 1000

In retrospect, I should have cranked the ISO up a bit more and found ways to adjust for the resulting graininess.

Car fire

Nikon D7000, 18-55mm (55mm), 1/250, f/8, ISO 200, cropped and adjusted

Having a bad day? At least this isn’t happening to your car.

I associate square aspect ratios with Polaroids, but here it makes for an interesting composition. Cropping down from 4:3 focuses attention on the important part of the scene, capturing an image that matches my perception.

Cave bear

Nikon D7000, 22mm (18-55mm), f7.1, 1/40, ISO 6400, cropped & retouched

This is the skeleton of a Short Faced Bear from the Field Museum in Chicago. These guys were serious business. For scale, imagine a person coming up to somewhere around the bottom of the bear’s rib cage.

Paleontologists believe these bears prevented human migration into the Americas for thousands of years. I suspect they did this by simply eating anyone stupid enough to try it. Still, it conjures images of the bears patrolling a checkpoint on the Bering land bridge.

“Oh no,” the bear says, making a twisting gesture with one giant claw. “Turn it around and march it right back where you came from. One look at y’all and we just know what you’ll get up to if we let you in here.”

Okay, down to photo business. As usual, I shot several pictures of this subject. This one turned out to be my favorite because by coincidence I happened to catch one of the ceiling lights right in the bear’s eye socket, giving it a devil skeleton bear look. And this was the 1666th picture I took with my D7000. Spooky.

On the other hand, the original shot required some editing. Here’s what it looked like straight out of the camera:

Nikon D7000, 22mm (18-55mm), f7.1, 1/40, ISO 6400

For starters, it needed a little cropping to emphasize the subject and improve the shot composition. But the real problem here is the distracting background stuff. For starters, the white dots of the ceiling lights floating in the black field are distracting. And worse, the bones behind the bear are creating a lot of visual “noise” that makes it harder to see the foreground subject, especially around waist level.

So off we go to Photoshop for some retouching. First I cropped the picture. Then I used the clone stamp tool to eliminate the floating lights. The tricky part was fixing the background. I didn’t want it to disappear entirely, but I didn’t want it messing with my bear. So I carefully masked the image, which looks like this on the screen:

With just the background selected, I darkened it up quite a bit. In the final version you can still get a sense of the space, but the rest of the skeletons are too dim to steal attention from the foreground subject.

Oh, and for what it’s worth: editing like this is fine if all you’re after is a better picture. But for a photojournalist, making these kinds of adjustments can create serious ethical problems. Folks who work for newspapers and news magazines are supposed to be capturing what they see and not eliminating elements just to make the picture look better. Some photojournalists have even been fired for removing elements or moving things around in their photos.

 

The Ethnic Fest

Nikon D3000, 26mm (18-55mm), f/6.3, shutter 1/8, ISO 200

The Wyandotte County Ethnic Festival is an event full of energy and motion. Video cameras have no trouble capturing motion, but still photographers have to be a bit more clever about it.

One of our two options is motion blur. Allowing the subject to move during the exposure creates a blurry, streaky image the viewer will read as motion. The key is shutter speed. The shutter must remain open long enough for the subject to move.

In this example, a group of dancers are making their way to the stage. I’ve got the ISO set at 200, which is a little low for most indoor lighting situations. As a result, the shutter needs to stay open for a long time (1/8 of a second) in order to get enough light for a good exposure. The dancers moved a fair amount while the shutter was open, resulting in a nice motion blur effect.

But motion blur can be tricky. You only want blur on moving subjects, not the picture as a whole. The subjects can move, but the camera can’t. If your hands move at all (even as much as the pressure of your finger on the trigger) while shutter is open, it will blur your entire image and make it look terrible.

In this example (shot just a second or two before the good one above), the camera moved just a teeny bit, wrecking the image quality.

Nikon D3000, 26mm (18-55mm), f/6.3, shutter 1/8, ISO 200

Thus to pull off motion blur you will generally want a tripod, monopod or something else to brace your camera.

Fireworks

Nikon D7000, 10mm, f/10, shutter 5 sec., ISO 200

I took this photo last week during the annual Fourth of July fireworks festivities. It has several things to teach us.

First, fireworks need to be facing up when you light them. We got three launchers lit at once, and you can see two of the three performing as designed in the middle of the photo. Unfortunately, the third one ended up sideways, spinning itself around as it shot flaming, exploding balls all over the neighborhood. You can see the light trail left by one that’s going off just out of the shot on in the lower right. In the middle right you can see one flaming under a truck in the driveway across the street. In the middle left you can see a big one in the street. And at the far left you can see one detonating in the bushes. That last one is also a lesson in the importance of raking the dead leaves out of your hedges, as it started a brush fire that took a few minutes to put out.

In the photography realm, the key teaching point is the importance of being in the right place at the right time with your camera ready. If my camera had been in a bag in the house, I wouldn’t have gotten the shot. Even if I’d been a little earlier or a little later with the shutter, the picture wouldn’t have documented the event as completely.

At least to an extent, photos like this are a matter of luck. But we can influence our luck greatly by taking steps to improve our odds. In class I nag students constantly about keeping their cameras with them at all times and getting into the habit of taking a ton of photos. Moments like this are the payoff for the practice.

You can also see some technical elements at work here. Normally shooting in extremely dim light with a low ISO would produce a big, black square. But the light from fireworks produces a strong lighting source. In this example, the loose pyrotechnics are sort of like having someone running around the shot firing a strong flash left and right. Because fireworks were the target of the shoot, I locked the camera down on a tripod and set the shutter for five seconds. This extremely slow shutter speed also allowed me to catch some more standard shots of explosions that went off in the sky like they were supposed to.

And for the more advanced photographer, I also followed some advice from Nikon’s newsletter and turned on the long exposure noise reduction setting.

Nikon D7000, 10mm, f/10, shutter 5 sec., ISO 200