One Game at a Time

Not a whole lot to say tonight other than ... I hate Ludwig Field. The lighting is awful. It's so sharp and from the sides. It's so difficult to shoot at night at Ludwig because the light is pretty much from one direction. You can't shoot from the sideline because 1/2 the players faces are dark when they look at you, and you can't really shoot from the sidelines either because the players backs are towards you because they are looking at the goal. The only possible players you can shoot are on the far side but you can't get them because the lights behind you can't reach them. Ugh...

I drove past the Field Hockey and Lacrosse Complex on the way to the game tonight and wished that the match was being placed in that facility. It's smaller but the lighting is so much better. Oh well...

I worked the 2008 NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament first and second round at Comcast Center this weekend. Unfortunately we didn't obtain photo credentials due to an NCAA regulation that prohibits online-only entities from taking photographs. Mr Dull at Maryland explained the rule to us and basically said the matter was out of his hands. It's unfortunate both for us and for the NCAA because there were very few (a handful at most) photographers covering the games. Both the NCAA and the DC Sports Box would have benefitted from photographic credentials because it would have generated more publicity for the league and better content for our group. But the rules are the rules, and we opted for file photos for the Duke and Maryland games and the NCAA Basketball logo for all the other games. It's hokey but at least we didn't break any rules.

There's been a lot of interest in our group lately and we have a few photographers and writers we've brought on board. It's exciting to see our group grow and succeed and I'm looking forward to being able to take more of a back seat with respect to covering games. I'd like to still be involved in order to help drive our group forward but I need to take a step back at times in order to regain my health and sanity. I've been sick a large number of times this winter and there's no doubt in my mind that it's a direct result of late nights up writing, editing, and processing photos, exposure to arenas with lots of people in them that are also sick, and also just the stress of trying to start up a new business. Having some other people shoulder the burdon will be very welcome.

The game tonight was pretty exciting. Lots of shooting and scoring and that is always good from a photography standpoint. You don't want to get lacrosse players just passing the ball and orbiting the goal. You want them bashing each other, flicking shots, and chasing down loose balls. I was pretty happy with my shots tonight, but my interest waned as the sun set and I switched my white balance over to stadium lights. Most of the shots I ended up using for the sight are from the early game. Please go read my article and view the photos I took of the Maryland vs Towson women's lacrosse game at Ludwig Field in College Park.

I ran into a new Diamondback shooter tonight. I didn't speak with her but I did notice that it was a new person. Maybe she's Yuchen's replacement. I also saw the photographer from the PG Sentinel. I keep meaning to ask her name since I see her at a lot of events and talk with her, but I always forget... Maybe next time. I also bumped into the CSC guard that worked next to me at the NCAA games this weekend. Most of the CSC guards I've met are personable and friendly people and this guy was very warm hearted. We chatted about the student section and the crowd and how successful Maryland has become in the past few years. It's nice getting to know the people you work with even if you only see them a few hours every other week.

There are a few events this weekend and I'll probably attend them. It all depends on the weather though. If it's rainy I'll probably stay in. But if it's sunny it should be a fun time!

Last night I posted several pictures from the lacrosse tournament I covered over the weekend. However, all of the pictures captured the Bowie players. I took a lot of pictures this weekend, and I wanted to get some up on the blog as quickly as possible. So I took the pictures I cropped for the Bowie Blade and posted them on my blog. This posting focuses on some of the other pictures I took of the other teams.

As I mentioned yesterday, I had a lot of fun shooting this event. There was lots of action, the weather was great, and my camera performed very well. I still can't get over how well those EN-EL3E batteries held up!

Today a coworker who's interested in photography asked me about my "workflow". I've heard several photographers discuss this topic, and I shared my workflow with him. This is it in a nutshell...

When I get home I take my CF card and put it into a card reader attached to my Windows computer. I despise Windows... I really really despise it. But I use Windows because Explorer can rotate images quite easily. All of my vertically oriented shots have the EXIF flags set for rotation, but I've found that few applications honor that flag. Most importantly, my hosting software (Gallery) doesn't support it. Nor does Microsoft Photo Editor and IE (which most people use when looking at my pictures).

After I load my pictures onto my Windows computer's C drive I copy them to my Linux file server. Then I go over to my MacBook Pro and NFS mount my file server. With my pictures showing up in the finder I navigate to the folder and run "open *.JPG". This takes a bit to load, but I'm able to look at all my pictures one by one. Then I crop...

When I crop in Preview I'm able to save the picture as a PNG. I drop it into my Documents folder. After I finish cropping I write my blog, and lastly I review my pictures for which ones I want to attach to my post.

My friend suggested using PHPture, or SmugMug.com, but I'm not sure how practical that will be for me. I don't like keeping my image files locally on my laptop because my backup system doesn't cover my laptop in depth. I like keeping them on my RAID-5 file server where they are mirrored nightly and weekly (both locally and offsite), and dumped nightly to a NFS mount. And my files are large enough that uploading them to a hosting service would be prohibitively expensive. My shoot this weekend of the lacrosse tournament resulted in 4GB of files. There's no way I can upload that over my cable modem!

My workflow clearly isn't ideal... I'd like to avoid Windows if at all possible, but I'd rather not have to use Aperture to perform the rotations. Awhile back I wrote a Python program that used PIL to perform the rotations, but it degraded the quality. I'd like to find some easy ways to rotate my files without losing quality. If I could do that under OSX I'd be very happy.

Anyhow... I'm interested in what workflows other photographers use and what they like/dislike about them. I'm sure there are tools out there that I'm unaware of... Maybe through your comments I'll find out about some!

Jake from the Bowie Blade put me to the test this weekend by offering me an assignment to cover the annual Southern Maryland Youth Lacrosse Association Tournament held in Bowie MD. It was a 2 day event held at Mitchelville Field, and it featured a ton of games! There were 7 fields, and all the fields were running games non-stop from about 9am until 6pm on Saturday. On Sunday 3 championship games were held. There were a ton of families in attendance, many bringing out tents, chairs, food for their teams, t-shirts, and other kinds of fare.

I was looking forward to this shoot during the week because it was my first non-collegiate sporting even to cover. I didn't quite know what to expect in terms of the performance of the teams. To my surprise the players were extremely physical and competitive. I managed to capture shots of many players flying through the air or being flipped over. It's definitely changed my opinion on youth sports - they're violent and highly competitive! Definitely a plus for a sports photographer...

During the week we were watching a low pressure system form north of Bermuda and drift westward towards North Carolina. Many models disagreed on if the Low would deepend off the Carolina coast and bring clouds and rain to the Maryland region on Saturday. Fortunately for all of us the low moved northward and just gave us wind and some cumulous clouds. It was superb shooting weather - mid 70s temp, low humidity, windy, and abundant sunshine (although there were a few clouds in the afternoon).

I started off using my 200mm/2.8 lens with my 2x TC but then quickly switched to just the 200mm/2.8. Because Gary (the event organizer) expected me to be there covering the event, and Jake had assigned it to me, I didn't hesitate to walk around the various parts of the field and shoot pictures. Maryland is a Division-1 NCAA school, and sometimes the referees, coaches, and event staff are aggressive in keeping "freelance" photographers from shooting from privileged vantage points (on the field). But since I was "official" for this event I was able to move about without any problems or without any questions being asked.

Because I was shooting such fast glass on such a bright day I set the ISO down to 100. In my previous post I commented on how I learned about passive autofocus and white balance settings... Up next on my list of things to learn and understand is the difference in ISOs when you shoot below 800. I understand that anything above 800 produces noise but offers more sensitivity.. I'd like to know what the difference is between shooting 100 ISO vs 200 ISO. Maybe it's clarity?

After covering an event in 2.8 glass at ISO 100 I believe I must've made a mistake at the race track. Using ISO 100 and 2.8 glass my meter indicating a shutter speed of 1/2000sec in some instances. Granted that I was shooting children on a grass playing field (a lot less reflective area than a white parking lot with shiny race cars!) but still... Maybe I didn't properly adjust my ISO when covering the SCCA event. I'm going to ask Greg when the next event will be held at FedEx and I'm going to attend. I'll bet I just made a mistake... Live and learn I suppose.

I noticed that at the game there were some people handing out "trading cards" and "player profiles" of the various players. I had a mixed reaction to seeing those cards. I definitely understand that the economic life of a photographer is not pleasant: glass is expensive, digital bodies are outdated every 2 - 3 years, and travel to events is becoming increasingly expensive due to high gasoline costs. Those 3 negatives are all on the cost side of the profit equation. The revenue side doesn't seem very positive other: I haven't spoken with any photographer who's said "I'm making a TON of money selling my photos!" This business seems to be full of high equipment cost and low revenue... It seems like you really have to love sports shooting in order to be successful at it, or heavily subsidize your sports shooting with income from your day job.

Anyhow... I understand that photographers have to make money, and so printing up trading cards and player profiles are ways for photographers to continue doing what they enjoy doing. And I understand that kids grow up and parents really have few chances of capturing those moments in time before their child grows up. Hence demand and supply meet and a market is created. None-the-less, it was kind of sad to see: parents paying lots of money for a few pictures of their kid in a posed shot.

Going back to the mechanics of covering this event... I learned several things during this outing. As I wrote earlier I learned about using low ISOs to make my 2.8 glass work well in a sunny environment. But, an equally important lesson I learned (although somewhat less interesting) is the use of "folders" on Nikons. When I shoot the pictures always end up in a folder named 100DSCN. I always wondered why they weren't just up at the top of the media card. Well, as it turns out, Nikons can create folders and this turns out to be quite handy.

I was assigned to primarily focus on the Bowie teams, but I tried to cover as many of the games as possible. I wanted to keep track of which teams were playing and what photos were part of which game. At first I walked the 7 fields and spent some time on each game, and then I went back to my car and moved the pictures from my camera into a "round_1" folder on my MacBook Pro. Then I went back out and shot "round_2". This didn't seem like a very efficient use of my time (walking back and forth to my computer), so I started looking up how the folders work. That's when I realized I could easily make a 101DSCN, 102DSCN, 103DSCN, ... folder and drop pictures directly into those folders on the camera. Then I just needed to carry a little notepad with me that mapped folders to games and times. It was a pretty good lesson because it meant I could cover more games without going back to my car to offload my pictures.

I also was impressed with my EN-EL3E batteries. I have a MB-D200 battery pack, and I've noticed that the camera is smart enough to deplete a single battery fully before it moves onto the second battery. This is nice because it allows you to start charging the depleted battery after it dies while you continue shooting off the first battery. I was able to cover all of the day's events on 2 EN-EL3E batteries, and I then used a car power inverter and my quickcharger to recharge one of the EN-EL3E batteries before I moved on to my night time events. It was definitely handy to have that inverter in the car for the 1 hour drive from the lacrosse fields to the soccer fields. By the end of the day I had been shooting almost continuously (except for the drive) for 14 hours and I still had some life left on one of the EN-EL3Es.

PS - All of the shots on this page feature Bowie. That's because I'm still processing the shots from the other games and I wanted to get my blog updated with some photos from the weekend. I easily spend an hour after each game rotating pictures, cropping, writing up my blog, selecting pictures, and arranging them.

The Terps took on the Yale Bulldogs on Sunday at Byrd Stadium in front of a packed crowd. It was senior day and so a lot of people came out to see the seniors off. The pace of the game was set in the opening 5 minutes of play with the Terps jumping out to a 4-0 lead.

It was a good shoot today. It was cloudy and I think that helped the exposure. When it's really sunny and the players wear white jerseys it's difficult to get a proper exposure. But when it's cloudy there's sufficient light to get fast shots but not too much light to overexpose.

This was my first shoot in Byrd Stadium during the day. I shot another Men's Lacrosse game but that was at night and it was before I had my 2x TC. I was hoping to get down onto the field but didn't have much luck at all. The recruits entrance to Byrd was locked shut and the CSC staff were searching people's camera bags. When they saw the size of my lens they shuffled me over to a desk that had a list of player's family members that were coming with camera equipment. Fortunately they just waved me on, but it was impossible for me to get down onto the field.

In retrospect I don't think it made too big of a difference. I was able to sit in the front row of the stands and that was only about 20 feet behind the other photographers on the field. It was kind of difficult to frame the shots tho because the people on the field kept getting in my way.

Greg was there shooting and he had an assistant he was mentoring. During half time I had a chance to talk with them and I found out that there's a group in Baltimore you can register with as an assistant and then you'll be called when a professional photographer needs some help. He mentioned that Washington DC has a similar program. I might look into that because the seasons are rapidly closing at Maryland and I'll have the entire summer off unless I can find some more places to shoot.