I have had a lot of fun shooting tennis over the years. Not only because I play the sport and really enjoy the tournament atmosphere, but because tennis is a fairly accessible and relatively inexpensive sport despite its hoity-toity public image. With proper planning one can get courtside seats with relative ease, particularly in the earlier rounds of an event.

The U.S. Open being on TV right now inspired me to do a little action photography post. I almost titled this one “freezing fast action” since that is really what I am going to be discussing here. Keep in mind that there are other ways of “capturing” fast action that don’t always involve “stopping” the action in time with your camera. Here are some tips for capturing that fleeting moment when the ball is about to leave some gut strings at 6000 rpm’s of topspin, or the crack of a bat throws wooden shrapnel into the sunlight!

Gear-

The good news is that if you want to capture action shots of your kids or some common sports that you can get close to like tennis, skateboarding, cycling or running, you won’t need to mortgage your home for a lens and camera. I do recommend a DSLR since most point and shoots have a lag between the time you press the button and the time the picture is taken. This technology is improving in newer point and shoots. Basically, you want a camera that fires as soon as the button is pressed. If cost is not an issue, go for a telephoto lens with a large aperture like f2.8. Another option is to rent it rather than buy it! These types of lenses start at $2000 but can be rented at most professional shops like Calumet. Get your hands on it on a Friday and some stores will let you keep it for a weekend on the one day rate.

Shutter, shutter, shutter-

Freezing fast action is all about shutter speed. The general rule for sports is 1/500 second or faster. I find this rule applies very nicely to tennis. The racquet and ball at 1/500 have a slight blur and the player’s movements are frozen. Push it up around 1/1000 and everything is frozen. Push it up around 1/2000 and you can read the writing on the ball! I prefer to have a slight motion blur to give a feeling of movement and keep the player in focus. You will find most pro sports photos are taken this way. But don’t be afraid to experiment.

Servo/Auto Focus-

Auto focus works well for me in most situations. On my canon I use “AI servo” which means you can hold down the button and the focus will automatically follow the subject as he/she moves. I enable only the center focus point and keep that one on the player as I move my camera.

Manual Focus-

Believe it or not, manual focus works well in action situations if you are adept at it. It involves some good anticipation skills. Set your focus to the “zone” where the shot is going to happen and then click just as your subject arrives in that zone. This technique works well for things like basketball when you know the money shot is going to occur three feet under the hoop.

Back button Focus-

This option has become a trend in DSLR shooting in recent years. It means using separate buttons for shooting and focusing. There are many advantages to this in my opinion. Look in your camera’s manual under “custom functions” to see if your camera supports this.

Manual-

For most action type shots I will shoot in Manual mode. I just feel that I will be more aware of my shutter speed, aperture and ISO when I have to actively set all of them. I start out by setting a baseline ISO for the conditions, and a  wide open or near wide open aperture (f2.8 or the lowest number your lens is capable of), this will allow me to get a decent exposure at a fast shutter speed.

Auto-

I don’t use auto mode much, but it can be done this way. Many cameras have a setting on the dial for sports (look for a picture of a sprinter on Canon cameras and set your dial to that). This mode dials in a shutter of 1/250 second or faster and gives an alert (flashing speed indicator on screen) if this threshold isn’t met.  This works fairly well in most situations but the real goal is to be able to drive the camera yourself rather than let it do all the decision making.

Practice-

Like most worthwhile things, becoming a deft action shooter takes practice and repetition. Local sporting events and skate parks are a great place to start. Learning what settings are going to work best for your sport of choice take some real world experience. Start with your camera’s manual, looking under “focus” and “shutter” as a starting point.

You do still have the manual right???

Thanks for reading!

The big A/C powered lights are up in my loft and there was no way I was going up there and working on a scorching July afternoon, so I decided to keep it compact and set up on the kitchen table with two small flashes (580ex and 430ex II). I got one of them set up on a light stand behind the tent and up high for my main light. Its triggered by a Pocket Wizard and set manually to about 1/2 power. Its going to be “carpet bombing” the whole picture. The tent will diffuse it and create a pretty soft even light on the knives. The diffusion material I am using is Grafix Matte Acetate in .005 thickness. (The tent frame itself is made from PVC pipe). I used to use tracing paper for a diffuser but the light just wasn’t hard enough for me. Jim Cooper gave me the idea to use this stuff instead which lets a bit more light through. The knives are so small and the light so close, I can work at ISO 100 at around f16 even with small lights like this. When you’re zooming in close on a product this size, its a good idea to stop down to f11 or more for good depth of field.

My second light is just going to create the blue accent. You can see it clamped to the stairwell with a Justin Clamp if you look real hard! The thing on the front of it is a Honl grid, which will help prevent the light from spilling all over the place. It also, of course has a blue color gel taped over the flash head.

The above is a picture I snapped with only the gelled accent light turned on. You can see there is no ambient exposure and the accent light is doing pretty much what its supposed to do, lighting a sliver of the knife frames and basically not getting in the way of the rest of the picture. Whenever I use a rim light or accent light, I always snap a couple frames with all the other lights turned off, just to see what its hitting. (This works good for portraiture too when adjusting a hair light for example). If Memory serves (and it usually doesn’t) I think the accent light was set at about 1/32 power. I’ll tell you a secret- I don’t use a light meter anymore. Sold it on ebay in fact. I blast away and use the LCD and histogram to give me the info I need.

Side note- if this post makes you want to run to Lowe’s and build a light tent from PVC pipe and start taking pictures of your forks and spoons, pick up a pack of this putty too. Its indispensable for product shots. Not only will it help you tilt your items to exactly the right angle, it will help secure them so you don’t like, scratch up a $500 knife or something. (doh!).  It does’nt leave anything gunky on the products which is nice.

Once your lights are all dialed in, it doesn’t hurt to reach into your bag of gels and try a couple different accent colors. Just keep some alternate shots in case your customer happens to prefer red or purple or pink. One more great thing about small flashes, color gels come about 4x oversize and you can cut them up and have some extras for when these get old and crumply.

Thanks for reading!

Took the family up near Lee Vining, CA last week to enjoy nature, a lack of cell phone reception and some great hiking. The Virginia lakes area is up above the Yosemite entrance and nestled right around 10,000 feet. I have been going up for years and this is the first time the elevation actually shocked my system a bit. After getting that sorted out, I got up at dawn a few times to shoot (even before fishing, I am quite proud of that). Turns out my daughter is a champion hiker at age 4 and my wife has saintly patience with me wandering off the camp site without a trace.

Man, I can’t even attempt to blog this. The beauty of the Eastern Sierra is unmatched. I took so many shots that my computer and editing queue are overwhelmed. Here’s a few for now. Still have to sort a bunch of panoramic stitches and family photos to go with the set, but its a start!

Thought I’d kick off the Independence day weekend with a little photo post from my last session. No better way to do it than with two U.S. Marines, looking to get some wedding photos they never had. Jim and Jhomara didn’t hire a photographer back when they got hitched, so I had the pleasure of photographing them to pick up a bit of the slack.  I did two things I rarely do for this shoot – used straight up natural light for just about everything, and returned to the exact same location of my last shoot.

Couldn’t resist setting up a subtle rim light for this second shot. Its my 430ex II just behind them and on low power. It doesn’t do any heavy lifting, just defines their edges a bit to give some added sharpness.

Thanks for reading! Think I’ll save my Independence Day ramblings for after the weekend when I have some 4th of July photos to accompany them. We’re going to enjoy the festivities in San Diego and exercise our freedom to slack off for a couple of days!

Times they are a changin’. Screens get bigger, native resolution increases, printers get better. I recently have been torn about whether or not to watermark my photos or at least include the customary frame with my name and URL so none of my work gets orphaned, stolen, used without permission etc. My feeling is really that watermarks and frames, although useful for advertising and security, always seem to take a  little something away from the most important thing: the image itself. They also carry a slight air of “I don’t trust you”, which is not something I want to convey.

In the process of trying to decide about watermarking, I have been mulling over some articles about only posting in “low resolution” or “web size” so as to protect your images from ending up on a billboard somewhere raking in megabucks for some big corporation, all whilst the struggling photographer cringes in a cold basement starving. While the latter scenario seems a bit far fetched, its important to consider the new definition of “low res” or “web size”.

Many articles argue that you can’t print with any quality from a “web size” image, but the meaning of “web size”  has changed greatly in recent years.

Here’s an example-

Facebook now takes a large image and reduces it to 720 pixels on the longest edge (constraining the other edge to preserve your aspect ratio).  A DSLR like my Canon 50d spits out a 2:3 type file that would start out at 4752 pixels x 3168 pixels.  Uploaded to Facebook, it would be reduced to 720 x 480 pixels. (Its better to resize them first, by the way).

This means one could download your image from Facebook and make a 7.2″ by 4.8″ print at 100ppi quite easily. If you think 100ppi ain’t enough, you’d be surprised. I’ve seen a few  of my images printed from Facebook (watermark and all!) and at a normal viewing distance, they look like a regular, bona fide,  photo quality print.

Does this mean you should watermark the heck out of your images? I don’t think so. I don’t know. Still haven’t decided whether to keep my watermark or just move on. But I do know this- if you want to keep people from making acceptable looking prints from your web sized images-consider sizing them under 400×400, or at the lowest possible resolution for your needs. If you’re not worried about it, go ahead and post that monster of a Hasselblad 60 megapixel beast on the web for everyone to download!

For a great article on the ins and outs of pixels and PPI, check here. -Oh, and thanks for reading!

I was able to setup three lighting schemes that worked out pretty well and each one had a different “vibe” so I decided to share those setups here. (Geek alert! stop reading and scroll down to see pretty pictures if you didn’t bring your pocket protector to class today).

Yah, this is nerdy stuff, I actually made this diagram on Strobox, a lighting diagram app for iPhone. I know you’re thinking this is a three light setup, but believe it or not, our model is completely lit up by ambient light coming from the open garage door. With the bright sun coming in and bouncing off the white walls, I was able to shoot available light at ISO 200 at around f4 to properly expose the model. The easiest way to get a white background is to simply use your lights to nuke the white background paper to about 1 to 1.5 stops overexposed compared with your subject. We later augmented the setup with a 3rd light (580ex) bouncing off the ceiling, but in many cases, you can pull this off with just two lights. Balance the ambient as your key light, or use just one background light and your second light as key.

Next we went to the black backdrop. To keep it dark, dark, black, make sure none of your lights are spilling onto the background. You could burn the shadows later in Photoshop, but less time editing is a very good thing, so why not try to nail it in the camera? Another step is to stop down the camera and speed up the shutter so no ambient light from the outside world contaminates the controlled lighting. Take a test shot without the flash and your LCD should be pitch black.

For the maternity shot above, we used a studio strobe with a medium softbox in pretty much a classic 45 degree pattern at camera left and up a bit. The second light is placed directly behind her. Its a hot shoe flash (430exII) with a Honl grid attached to prevent spill and a 1/2 CTO color gel to make things go a bit orange and give some color contrast.

This last one is my favorite and it is probably the easiest one to set up on the fly. The background is just the drywall on the opposite side of the garage. (I wanted to work on something else while another model finished working on the “real” backdrop.)

This one was made with two small Speedlights. One was equipped with a Honl snoot, place high and camera right. I asked the model to close her eyes while I did some test pops to make sure the light would hit her eyes. The small illuminated triangle on her right cheek is what defines “Rembrandt lighting”, and is pretty much a variation on 45 degree or “Loupe” lighting.

The second light was set on low power, covered with a red color gel and aimed at the drywall behind her. See my portfolio for a couple other versions of this “snooty” setup.

So there you have it. Three setups that are relatively portable, use simple backgrounds, and can be done with just two lights.

If you enjoy my blog, please help me out by linking this page……Oh, and thanks for reading!

]]> http://www.balancedigital.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=596 2 http://www.balancedigital.com/blog/?p=579 http://www.balancedigital.com/blog/?p=579#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 19:55:51 +0000 rob http://www.balancedigital.com/blog/?p=579

Chris and I were getting set up for a family portrait session last night at the beach and he started doing some funky poses behind our diffuser panel just for laughs. I shot some silhouettes  and noticed something pretty revealing. Even when you’re up high on the cliff you get two distinct shadows. One is from the direct sun and one is from the water reflecting quite a bit of light upward at Chris and putting higher soft shadow on the panel.

One of the reasons I love shooting near sunset on the beach, the reflected light can extend your shoot time to about 20 minutes past sunset. Working at the beach doesn’t totally suck either.

Next post will be some images from the session and a special thanks goes out to Stephanie, Matt and Josiah for letting us photograph you.

Thanks for reading!