One Game at a Time

This afternoon I cut my weekend vacation short so I could head back to College Park to shoot the Terps vs UNC Charlotte. It was the first game for 2009 and there aren't too many non-conference games left before Maryland enters the meatier part of it's schedule.

I shot from the stands for the first half using the 300mm lens at f/4.5 aperture, 1/400th second, and ISO 2500. There were some great opportunities for photos this evening because both teams were highly competitive but I missed a lot of them. There was always a referee in the way, an defender's arm crossing a guard's face on their way to the net, or the player took a shot with their close in arm and blocked their face. It was frustrating because the action was intense but the shots just weren't there in a lot of circumstances.

I headed down to the court for the last 3 minutes of the first half and managed to snatch a few decent frames before heading into the media room at half-time. I think I ended up running 1 or 2 of those shots because they came out pretty well. I'm thinking more and more about trying to avoid running the shots where the face is not prevalent. It's difficult though because so many of the photos that feature players shooting fall into this category - the player looks up at the net while they shoot and I'm down low in the paint. Photographers out towards the 3 point line and beyond have a better angle but then again they can miss a lot of the action that unfolds in the paint.

During the last game I synchronized the clocks on both my D3s and that has helped a lot during post-processing. The clocks were off by about an hour because the previous owner of one of them didn't believe in daylight savings time. As a result my Lightroom albums had out-of-order photos, which made it difficult to add context to each caption. After synchronizing the clocks post processing has become much easier.

I though about changing the camera post-processing for color enhancement from "standard" to "vivid" but then held back at the last minute. I've been happy with how my cameras have performed and tweaking something like that just before a game seems like its going to invite trouble.

During half-time I offloaded roughly 160 photos from 2 CF cards and brought the photos into Lightroom. Lastly I tagged the publishable photos and the photos to delete all before there was 6 minutes left in the halt-time. It's helpful to have a fast card reader (note: I use a Lexar FW800), all your directories in Lightroom created, and your computer ready to import before you head out for the first half!