One Game at a Time

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!