Photo of the Day
Last night I was watching a series of videos on KelbyTraining.com showing how the pros shoot a football game. Both Dave Black and Scott Kelby were shooting a high school football game. I finished the video up after work today, and I had the itch to shoot a football game. In LaPorte the freshman level games have always been played on Thursday night. That is not the case here. I decided to take someone up on an offer and shoot a high school volleyball match. I have never really even watched a volleyball game let alone shoot one. It is a fast paced sport that can be kind of hard to anticipate. I started to pick up on some things early on, and maybe next time I can capitalize on what I learned today. The biggest thing that I learned near the end was to key on one player. Instead of trying to capture the constant movement of the ball I decided to just focus on one player and get them when they entered the action. That is how the shot above came to be. I have posted some more photos from the day on my Google+ page here.
Technical Data
I can finally talk about something in this section. The whole purpose of attending the match today was to try out the 70-200mm 2.8 lens that I am renting. The point of the lens is to allow me to shoot in low light situations better. What better place to shoot in low light than a high school gym? Early on I realized that I would have to shoot at 6400 ISO. That is not ideal, but my camera seems to give me decent results at such a high ISO. Even up there I could only get about a 1/500th of a second shutter speed. Ideally I would like to be around 1/1000th of a second, but I didn’t see too much blurring. The big ah-ha moment tonight was when I brought the pictures into Lightroom to view them. They all had a yellow tint to them due to the lights in the gym. One great thing about shooting RAW was that I changed the white balance in Lightroom to Florescent, and it seemed to fix them. I was very happy with the results then. Besides that just a couple crops, and that was the extent of my editing. It is nice to not have to do too much to the photos when there are so many. Next time I will do a batch edit to get my white balanced changed on all of them at once. That will speed things up even more.
Dave Wegiel Photography 