Men's Basketball: Elite Camp

Saturday evening at 11:09pm a customer of mine emailed and asked if I could shoot a basketball camp at Comcast Center the following morning at 9:30am. A Sunday morning basketball camp on campus? I thought it had to be a mistake...

But sure enough it wasn't and the Terps were hosting a summer camp in Comcast Center for some high school players from around the region. To my surprise many of the varsity squad were playing, referee'ing, or coaching. Even the coaching staff was on hand (including Coach Williams) to observe the players and offer advice.

I focused on a handful of players and got the shots we needed. It was enjoyable being back inside Comcast and seeing the team scrimmage. On the way out I had to catch myself though - I instinctively went to bundle up before heading out the freight-door of Comcast. My Pavlonian instinct was that the outside temperature would be freezing due to the cold weather that is common during basketball season. It was quite a shell shock stepping out into a sunny summer mid-80s environment!

Women's Soccer: Washington Freedom vs Chicago Red Stars

It's been awhile since I posted. But hopefully I'm back for awhile. My responsibilities increased a lot in the late Spring and I couldn't find the time to maintain my blog as religiously as in the past. But now that summer is here I believe I'll have a better shot at regularly updating my blog.

That being said...

On Saturday I shot a Freedom game down at RFK. My new Garmin Nuvi 760 routed me around a traffic jam on the BW Parkway and took me through Washington DC to avoid the delay. I made it to the venue with a few minutes to spare and headed to the field to assemble my gear.

Fortunately the weather played along with the game. Despite showers all week Saturday was sunny and spectacular. There was plenty of light on the field!

I shot the first half with the sun over my back and focused on the Freedom defense in the near side of the field. Towards the end of the first half I walked over to the far side of the field and shot into the sun. I like the halo effect you can get when you shoot directly into the sun. I got a nice shot of a player with some sweat coming off her brow after she headed a corner kick. It would've been better if I had caught her eyes. But oh well...

Earlier this week I reorganized my Lightroom Catalog. I have over 35k files in the original catalog Lightroom created when I first ran it less than a year ago. When I switched from Aperture to Lightroom I noticed a remarkable speedup. However, it's been running slower and slower as I cram more and more files into it. After doing some research I decided to split out my images into separate catalogs.

Of the 35k files in my catalog 30k are in the "Maryland Terrapins" folder. I split those off and made a separate catalog for the Terps. I then partitioned my remaining 5k files into a Personal catalog (family, friends, work, etc) and Projects catalog (night life, professional teams, etc). The key to this was asking Lightroom to avoid placing DNG copies in the catalog as well as to skip thumbnail creation/copying.

While my "Maryland Terrapins" catalog is still large and slow my other catalogs move along a lot faster. I've given some thought about how to carve up the "Maryland Terrapins" catalog but I haven't come to any conclusions yet. A logical choice would be to demarcate my Terrapins catalog based on sport or based on time frame (e.g. FY2008). However, the down side with that approach is that I couldn't easily cut across sports or produce a full dump of all my published Terrapin imagery. So it's still up in the air. I have some time until Fall semester sports begin in earnest so I'll probably come up with something between now and then.

Water Polo: Maryland vs George Washington

On Wednesday evening I headed over to Eppley Natatorium to report on the meet between the Maryland Terrapins and the neighboring Colonials of George Washington. Maryland's had a tough ride this season and has only competed in 2 meets at home this year. The squad was on the road for the past 45 days and competed against top-25 teams on the west coast. With this evening being the final regular season home meet for the Terps I wanted to make sure I was there to capture it.

I went with a 400mm remote (using a PocketWizard MultiMax) trained on the Maryland goalie using manual focus. Unfortunately I didn't have the focus quite right in the first half and all my shots were off by about 3 feet of focus. It sounds like a lot but when you are a good 50 yards away the 3 feet is a pretty slim margin. None-the-less the shots were unusable. I corrected in the second half and was able to walk away with some publishable shots of Ashleigh Jobson in goal.

At halftime I had some fun and got a pretty cool shot of the team as they prepared to return to the field for the second half. I held my D3 out over the pool a good 2 feet while using a 14-24mm lens at 14mm. I was really happy with how it turned out. After breaking the huddle I headed over to where the referee dropped the ball and grabbed some shots of both the Colonials and the Terps swimming it down. They weren't as great as they could've been - the remote pole that Yuchen Nie uses in some of his huddle shots would've been really useful.

All in all the game was a lot of fun and I played around with the shutter speed a lot. The nice thing about water polo is that the swimmer's faces don't move around much compared to football, basketball, or lacrosse. The movement is in their arms as they fire a shot or make a pass. Thus you can slow the shutter to something like 1/250th and you'll get some nice blur on their arm that shows motion.

Go take a look at my article and photo gallery of the Maryland Terps water polo team facing the George Washington Colonials over on the DC Sports Box!

Women's Basketball: Maryland vs Louisville

I headed to a python programming conference in Chicago over the weekend and that prevented me from attending the Maryland Sweet Sixteen game against Vanderbilt in Raleigh NC. With Coleman's historic 42 game in the record book I looked to the calendar to plan how I would make it down to Raleigh on Monday for the game against Louisville.

The NCAA has rules about credentials that stipulate a requirement where photographers have to follow the team on the road in order to be granted Final Four credentials. With a win on Monday evening the Terps would advance to St Louis and I really wanted an opportunity to shoot a Final Four. As a result I was compelled to travel to Raleigh on Monday afternoon to shoot the game against Louisville in order to preserve my credential to St Louis.

Julie headed south with me and we had a great time on the drive down. The weather was sunny, the traffic was light, and the GPS was a lot of fun as it told us exactly when we would arrive. We had a long chunk of time to talk and get reacquainted, which was really nice considering I was just in Chicago for several days a programming conference. We arrived in Raleigh roughly 1 1/2 hours before tipoff and headed to the RBC Center. My parents were also in town for the game so we surprised them at the entrance to the arena. They were really excited to see us and were filled with smiles. That alone made the trip worth it.

Navigating the RBC Center was a breeze. I found the media room and tucked away my bag and laptop before heading out to the floor. I took a few samples and was pretty surprised by the flatness of the light in the arena.

Photos shot with flash have a lot of pop. That is, the histogram of the colors is very spikey. This provides great differences in color and brightness in the photo. I'm not sure if how much a photo "pops" is a factor of narrow aperture or if it is determined by the type of light that illuminated the subject in the frame. After tonight I lean towards the type of light being the driving factor.

After a few test shots I noticed that my photos seemed really flat. The RBC Center was well lit and I could shoot reliably at ISO 1600, 1/500th, and f/3.5 but my photos didn't have the same "pop" as they do in Comcast. The colors just seemed flatter.

The shoot was a lot of fun because I was in a new arena and surrounded by excited fans rooting on their team. Unfortunately Maryland lost but that opened up some decent tear-filled shots. It was sad to see Kristi Toliver and Marissa Coleman lose so badly in their final game in a Terrapin uniform but at the same time you can't forget the accomplishments of the two players. National champions with over 2,000 points each is no small feat.

After the game in the press conference I bumped into a photographer/videographer from Inside Women's Basketball. I didn't catch her name but I believe it's Kelly Kline after checking out their website. I bumped into her back during the Maryland vs Mississippi State game earlier this year while she was shooting some SLR Video in the media room after the post-game press conference. SLR Video is an exciting new area of imagery that combines the action of video with the detail of still photography.

A typical 1080p signal has a resolution of 1920x1280 which is roughly 2.073MP . In contrast a 10MP FX D3 sensor captures at 4236x2832, which is over twice the detail of a TV camera. The D3X, with a 24.5MP FX sensor, shoots images at 6048x4032. If the D3X could shoot SLR video it would contain roughly 3x as much detail as a 1080p signal.

Additionally, the image processing engine on a D3 is a streamlined monster that brings out great color and dynamic range in a photo. The colors on a SLR camera are considerably richer than stills shot on a TV camera, even when you drop down to lower resolutions. Simply put, a 2MP shot on a D3 will outshine a still from a TV camera due to the image processing engine on the D3.

Some really bright people in industry have looked at the greatness of SLRs and asked: what if we leave the shutter open and simply shoot video straight off the sensor? With sports photography cameras already reaching 11fps it's not too unreasonable to think about striving for 18 more frames to get us up to TV speed. In fact it seems unavoidable. I predict that in 10 years SLRs will shoot 25-29fps. Mark my words.

During the Maryland game over the winter I didn't catch the name or the outlet of the videographer/photographer shooting SLR video in the media room but I was extremely interested in what she was doing. It was the first application of this exciting new area of imagery that I had witnessed. Naturally, when I bumped into her at the Louisville game I was very excited to hear about how the SLR Video interview came out.

Fortunately she gave me a flyer that directed me to their website. I found the video of Kristi Toliver after the game interviewed for Inside Women's Basketball and it looks really good. Go take a look!

Women's Basketball: Maryland vs Utah

On Tuesday evening I returned to Comcast Center for my final home game of the 2008/2009 season for the Maryland Terrapins. The women's basketball team hosted the first and second rounds of the NCAAW Tournament and after Maryland's win over Dartmouth on Sunday I had the privilege to return Tuesday night for a tilt between the Lady Terps and the Utes from Utah.

I'm no stranger to Comcast and have learned a lot this season about shooting basketball from a variety of different angles. During my first year or two my excitement about being on the baseline and my inexperience proved too much from the standpoint of exploring the arena. This season the newness of shooting basketball has waned and I looked for different angles and spots to shoot from. By roaming around the various parts of the Comcast Center I learned a lot more about effective ways to shoot basketball.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) this evening's game was packed with fans. The higher the attendance the more difficult it is to move around in the stands and shoot from different angles. I did my best but the limited space cornered me into 2 or 3 spots in the first half. I built on Sunday's experience and brought both my 300mm and my 400mm into the stands. I used the 300mm for play on the close end of the court and the 400mm for play on the opposite side. I was very pleased with how well it worked.

Post processing this evening was especially time consuming due to the large volume of photos I shot. With this being the last game I wanted to capture as many shots of KT and Coleman as I could as well as of the visiting Utes.

Women's Basketball: Maryland vs Dartmouth

This afternoon I shot the Maryland's women's basketball game against Dartmouth. I've shot every home game for the Terps this season in Comcast and I'm very comfortable with the light and the environment.

Drawing on my great experience using the 400mm from the stands I decided to rely more heavily on the long glass for the second game of the afternoon. I remained in the stands for the entire first half and shot at 300mm and 400mm. It was partially by choice and partially by necessity. Amazingly all of the photo spots on the floor were occupied. I say "amazingly" because in the 2008 NCAAW Tournament there were very few photographers on the floor. I'm not sure what's different this year but every available spot was taken.

I wasn't upset though because my shots from the stands often come out on equal footing to my shots from the baseline. There's a lot more light up there and you get a lot better shots of players faces when you are up higher.

At halftime I retreated from the stands and made my way onto the court for a spot on the baseline in the second half. There was 1 spot that opened up on the Maryland baseline for the second half and I grabbed it. I stayed out on the court to hold my spot for fear of it being taken by another photographer!

I shot the opening minutes of the second half with my 300mm lens but I quickly switched to the 400mm with 15 minutes remaining. The transition to the 400mm was a bit difficult at first because it's such a powerful zoom but the shots came out really well. You definitely get more shots on the 300mm but the quality of the shots on the 400mm is simply amazing.

The only problem I had this afternoon came during post processing. Last night while cleaning one of my D3 camera bodies I noticed a compartment in the battery area that seemed to detach. I decided to explore it and I found a battery present. I believe it is the CMOS battery and sure enough when I post processed today all my photos were out of order. When I removed the latch it disconnected the CMOS battery and the date on the camera reverted to 1970. Oh well... Guess I learned my lesson there. :)

Women's Basketball: Utah vs Villanova

On Sunday afternoon I photographed the Utah Utes battling Villanova in the opening round of the NCAAW Tournament. Comcast has been a great venue to photograph this season and I've learned a lot about shooting basketball this season. I pay a lot more attention to which center is going to tip and which hand they use to tip along with which direction each team will face in the first half. All of this input flows into the equation of where to sit so you have the best chance of catching a great shot.

I changed my approach slightly this afternoon by bringing my 400mm lens into the stands so I could better photograph the far end of the court. I typically shoot the better part of the first half from the stands and focus on Maryland's shooting on one end using a 300mm lens. That usually puts the other end of the court out of reach for the 300mm but today I decided to extend it by switching to the 400mm on the far side. The results were great!

The only problem I had was from crowd density. There were enough people in Comcast this afternoon that I had to take a suboptimal spot in the stands where I wouldn't disturb anybody. My position behind a handrail blocked about 1/3 of the far side of the court. I suppose it wasn't too bad though - the area of the court the handrail blocked was close to the Maryland bench and there would've been a lot of noise from the coaches standing up and directing the defense.

I got some great shots of Utah shooting in the paint in the first half and moved down to the floor at halftime. Rather than offloading I thumbed through my photos on the camera and weeded out the out of focus, cluttered, or boring shots. At the end of halftime I had it down to roughly 100 photos.

During the second half I shot entirely from the baseline and got some great shots of the defense. It's incredible how much difference there is in the quality of the light on a 300mm prime lens vs a 70-200mm lens. I use the same body, same exposure settings, same AF strategy, and same white balance but my 300mm shots come out looking incredible while my 70-200mm shots come out lacking. I wish I knew how to make my 70-200mm shots look like my 300mm shots. Maybe an 85mm prime would look better...

After the game I fired off a quick lead-in photo while I started post processing. I didn't get very far before I had to head back down to the court for the Maryland game vs Dartmouth.