I shot...

...VHS Boys and Girls Varsity basketball v Cascade Christian last night with two major changes:

• I went back to AI Servo Auto-focus from AI Focus Auto-focus (which I don't usually use, and which I used exclusively for VHS Boys and Girls Basketball v Fife), and

(Actually as it turned out I didn't switch to AI Servo after all, but shot in AI Focus Auto-Focus...)

• I used motor-drive extensively, which I don't usually use, rather hoping to catch That One Moment(tm) simply by timing and luck

In the first case, the distinction between the two focusing modes is (supposedly) that AI Servo tracks moving subjects continually ("While you hold down the shutter button halfway, the subject will be focused continually.") and AI Focus switches between One Shot Auto-focus ("When you press the shutter button halfway, the camera will focus only once.") and AI Servo automatically, as soon as the subject starts moving.

I've found from working through the Fife basketball photos (AI Focus, not AI Servo) is that, in fact, none of them seem to be focused right-on: many of them are close, but none of them are really great.

In the second case, I've never been really impressed with motor drive because once you press the shutter it's just *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* and there's really no particular guarantee that any one of the *bang*'s (as it were) is going to be, again, That One Moment(tm).

So I've got to get last night's photos burned to DVD so I can move them over to a Window$ box and get a look at 'em.

I love...

...depth of field, and color.

This from Vashon Island Soccer Club Wasabi GU-12 soccer, just put up.

f5.6 has become my favorite aperture, I guess because it produces effective depth-of-field for objects that are reasonably separated, and yet provides for full focus on the subject itself.

Details: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f2.8L at 120mm; ISO 800; Exposure aperture priority (Av) at f5.6 and 1000th second; White Balance "daylight".

Here's a good shot...

...from VHS Girls Varsity basketball v North Mason, which I just put up.

The basketball's not even in the image and yet you get a strong sense of what's happened: the shot's off, the defender's late, who knows if it dropped, the photo stands on its own as a statement about basketball without containing the entire narrative.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 73mm; ISO 6400; Manual exposure at 250th second at f5.6; white balance "fluorescent/4000K"; AI Servo auto-focus with a single, center focus point.

Which brings up a question...

...why do I shoot so bloody many photos at any given event?

Good question.

• Law of Averages: take a lot of photos, and something's bound to be good ;-)
• I'm not into journalistic photography, where the reporter needs one shot to augment the (text-based) story. I want to shoot the entire event visually, not just the moment
• I very consciously try to get shots of everyone, not just the stars.
• Why not? One of the particular things I like about digital photography is that there's no significant monetary cost associated with one photo, or one hundred, or one thousand
• When I empty out the compact flash card, it's re-formatted and then it's empty and then it's completely reusable
• Compare and contrast with chemical photography, which is where I came from, where I'd agonize over whether to shoot a 24 or a 36, and then agonize about having a given roll processed when all 24 or 36 frames weren't shot
• When I burn a shoot onto DVD's (which is the very first thing that I do after the images come off the CF card) my cost there is about 66 cents per DVD -- this for a high-quality Taiyo Yuden DVD and a polypropylene C-shell DVD case -- so when I burn an average DVD with maybe 230 images on it (and that wouldn't be full) my cost is about .00287 cents per image
• So (for example) the entire evening's worth of 1,047 photographs for VHS Varsity Basketball v Fife cost me 5 DVD's or $3.30 actual cash expense
• Extra Credit Question: how much would 1,047 photos cost me if I was still shooting Ektachrome?
  

OK: so, time?

You would think that it takes a ton of time to go through 1,000 shots, and in a sense it does, but the wading-through and weeding-out goes something like "nope.. nope.. nope.. nope.. wait a minute.." and it's the wait-a-minutes that get RAW converted into tiffs, and post-processed into the first-cut candidates.

Then when I've got all the first-cuts converted, cropped and adjusted I go through 'em again, which is something like "OK.. OK.. OK.. nah.." and the "nah's" get gone, and then I edit the perl script that actually generates all the jpegs and all the html, run the script, edit the resulting html a little, integrate the new html into the rest of my web site, put the jpegs up on Amazon S3, and we're good to go!

Every now and then...

...you really get one. (Click on the photo for the full view).

I shot 1,047 photos at VHS Varsity Basketball v Fife last night, 443 at the girls' game and 607 at the boys' game -- the difference being mostly cheerleader shots and crowd shots and band shots during the boys' game -- and every now and then I really get one.

This was late in the fourth quarter with the Pirates fairly well up; as I remember it (it's all kinda a blur when you watch a basketball game through a viewfinder) on a steal-fast break with only one Fife defender who was able to even get close to getting back on defense.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom at 70mm; ISO 6400; White Balance "fluorescent"; Exposure "Manual" at 250th second at f5.6; hand-held, available light.

A definite keeper ;-)

And both the Pirate boys and the Pirate girls Varsity won: Girls 51-38, Boys 58-43!

A milestone of sorts...

...happened at the Pirates' basketball game this evening down at the High School gym.

I just shot my first 10,000 shots (in fact 10,227 by actual count) on the new EOS 5D Mark II.

:-/

This poses a logistical problem of sorts, one that I've had to come to terms with before.

If I want all my photos to be sequential when I put them up on my web site ( xxxx_some_event_name.jpg -- where xxxx are four incrementing digits) what do I do when I roll over from IMG_9999.CR2 to IMG_0001.CR2?

I use the Linux rename command to rename the RAW files, dropping the IMG_ prefix, and adding a "1" prefix to the 9xxx.CR2 file names, and a "2" prefix to the 0xxx.CR2 file names, and now my shots wrap around from 19,999 to 20,000 and onward.

Cool, huh?

'Course I'll also use rename to add a more descriptive middle to the RAW files, something like _Boys_Varsity_BBall_v_Fife_120909 most likely...

When it goes right...

...and when it goes wrong.

Well, maybe not really wrong but just not optimal.

The VISC Wasabi GU-12 soccer match I shot in the morning Saturday went wrong because I was trying to get out of the house too fast.

Bright-bright-bright cloudless sunny mid-morning day with a low winter sun angle at the south end of the pitch.

Didn't put the 1.4x extender on the 70-200mm f2.8L, so I was short about 28mm on the wide end, and short about 80mm on the tele end of what I could have had, which would have been 98mm-280mm.

Really makes a difference for field sports...

Then I forgot to make a Mr. Green Jeans exposure compensation for all the green: green grass, green uniforms, green background in the woods outside the playfield fence.

Then I found I had forgotten to empty out my CF cards from the previous night's basketball games, but since I had almost 2 hours before the next match -- Buccaneers GU-13 -- I could easily go home and fix everything: empty out the CF cards, put on the 1.4x extender, and actually sit and think about why the soccer match I'd just shot was consistently over-exposed by 2/3 stop...

The afternoon's match with the extender and with exposure compensation for all the green yielded consistently better shots.

What a better place to be...

...than on a soccer pitch on a cold-and-sunny December Saturday afternoon?

Buccaneers GU-13 at half time.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f2.8 with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length of 98-280mm, this shot at 98mm.

ISO 800; White Balance "Daylight"; Aperture priority exposure at f8.0 yielding 400th second; exposure compensation -2/3 (Mr. Green Jeans);

Here's a...

...very quick first pick from Varsity girls v West Seattle last night:

This was the first opportunity I had to get the new EOS 5D Mark II into the Vashon High School gym and see what it would do.

I'm very impressed.

First off, having a native ISO of 6400 means that I can set a reasonable manual exposure of 250th second at f5.6, stop action pretty well, and still have something that I can actually see when I'm reviewing photos for RAW conversion and post-processing.

Details:

• EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L; center spot-point focusing with AI Servo Auto-focus
• White Balance 4000K, for "standard" metal halide lighting; this was kind of a guess since the VHS gym lights are notorious for their weird color due to the random way light bulbs have been replaced over the years, and due to the wildly varying ages of the bulbs themselves
• ISO 6400; manual exposure at 250th second at f5.6; hand-held available light
  
• RAW conversion: Smart Noise Reduction "normal"; White Balance "Color temp" of 4000K; Sharpness "As-shot" of 3; this particular photo had an Exposure Compensation of +0.6
• Post-processing: rotate right 0.5 degree; crop; pull up the low end in Levels to +5

Oh yeah! Varsity won 57-52, and JV won 49-39!

Go Pirates!

Things are getting...

...a little tricky with the RAW conversion for the McMurray girls' soccer photos.

What's going on is that I shot from daytime-no field lights into darkness-full field lights.

The daytime photos were shot White Balance "cloudy" because that's what it was.

The full nighttime photos were shot White Balance 3300K because that's what it was then.

What's happening now is that I'm doing the dusk photos: the final photos of the Varsity match is mostly "daylight" with the field lights just starting to come on, and the first JV match photos were taken as it got darker and darker and the field lights had more and more effect.

So at the moment I'm manually converting the Varsity at 5200K, and manually converting the JV photos at 4500K.

I suspect the Varsity photos will ease toward 4500K at the last of them, and at some point I'll ease down to 3300K as the JV photos move into full darkness.

:-/

This photo's...

...pretty amazing on a bunch of different levels:


Where to start?

1. Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm; this shot at 98mm
   
2. ISO 6400, with no (that's as in "none") digital noise reduction after RAW conversion
3. I screwed up and (because I kept wiping the camera off with a towel from my trunk during one of Puget Sound's famous "drowning mists") actually shot this at 320th second, f5.6, rather than the 250th of a second I had really intended
4. So during RAW conversion this received an exposure compensation of +2.0
5. Manually set White Balance at 3300K in the camera, and during RAW conversion; noise reduction "high" during RAW conversion; sharpness "3" as-shot during RAW conversion
6. (You can see how the White Balance of 3300K really works pretty well because you can discern the different hues between the stripes on the jersey, which are a very pale cream, and the numbers, which as is the ball, are white)
   
7. Adjusted Levels down to 240 on the high end during post-processing
   

And all this was from a shot made under the (in)famous McMurray field lights, which are adequate for human vision at night, but worse than a joke for photography.

Fortunately the subject was right in front of me, and the light tower was just back off behind my right shoulder.

Tuesday night's...

...VISC soccer practices gave me a very good opportunity to work on several things I don't usually get to mess with during the course of an actual game.

• A manually-set color temperature of 3300K for the McMurray field lights works about as good as anything's going to get to establish the proper white balance at RAW conversion
• Shot at manual exposure, ISO 6400, 250th second, f5.6, and just let 'er rip: pick up the exposure pieces during RAW conversion and post-processing
  
• alternated between a single center-point-focus and the generic 9 auto-focus points; jury's still out, although I'm still tending to think that the single center-point-focus works best
• alternated between single shot and motor drive; in the past I've found that motor drive doesn't necessarily do any better at catching that One Perfect Moment(tm) than just becoming familiar with a sport and leaving the timing up to my shutter finger

Also I was able to get out on the field, right next to the goal, and get the lights (such as they are) somewhat where I wanted them...

Well...

...got to see just how weather-proof the 5D Mark II is: McMurray Girls' Soccer this evening (Varsity, 12-nil, JV, 8-nil, and I'm not making that up) took place under one of Puget Sound's famous drowning mists.

Virtually nothing showed on the doppler radar but the air was simply filled with multitudes of tiny droplets and everything became soaked in minutes.

I didn't have my rain cover 'cause nothing had shown up on the radar as I was leaving home, but I was able to get a towel out of my trunk at half time.

Worst problem was my glasses, which I took off and left in the trunk at the half.

The 5D Mark II functioned flawlessly, as far as I can tell.

I blew it off with a can of compressed air when I got home and chased little droplets out of various crevices and dried it off with a towel.

I think I'll let it sit overnight before I open any of its little hatches...

...or maybe not.

Welcome back...

...to my old (formerly dead) EOS 5D.

UPS just dropped it off from Canon's Factory Service Center; the issue was the EOS 5D "main mirror detachment" problem.

Basically the mirror that flips up out of the way (common to any single lens reflex camera, film or digital) comes unglued and flops around inside the body.

Eighteen days since I shipped it off.

I can see the little brackets that Canon adds to the edges of the mirror (as well as re-gluing it), so some time this week I'll take it out and see if it works.

:-/

Well, bummer...

...seems I will not be photographing this year's Nutcracker 2009 down at the High School.

Another individual has sole rights to all Nutcracker photography this year -- something to do with "business".

Quite disappointing, really...

Next shoot...

McMurray Girls' Soccer, this afternoon down at McMurray.

Been a while since I've been able to shoot McMurray sports, so this will be fun.

Now up...

...the all-new Blue Heron Dance Nutcracker 2008 photos.


All the images are now up on Amazon Web Services S3 and all the html has (of course) been re-written.

1,584 jpeg images including the thumbnails and the full size images, and 813 separate web pages.

Quite a project, but nice to have it done finally :-/ and nice to have it up a week before this year's Blue Heron Dance Nutcracker 2009, at the Vashon High School theater, Friday-Saturday-Sunday, December 4-5-6.

Still don't know which performance I'll be shooting this year...

Nutcracker 2008...

...is coming right along.

Most of the way finished with post-processing The Land of Sweets, and then it's time to do the html and put it all up.

Here's a great one from the Nutcracker Waltz.

I know!

What with Blue Heron Dance's Nutcracker coming up December 4-5-6, 2009, maybe I should feature photos from Nutcracker 2008!

It'll take a little work but it'll be worth it.

These are shot in the Vashon High School theater; I get a seat in the back row center (or as close to it as the light operators can let me) and shoot down onto the stage from just slightly stage left.

Canon EOS 5D (last year, this year I'll get to use the 5D Mark II); 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens; ISO 1600; white balance "auto"; manual exposure (M) of 200th second at f5.6; camera's mounted on my Bogen/Manfrotto 3011BN tripod. Or actually it's mounted on my Bogen/Manfrotto 3130 tilt-pan head, and that's mounted on the tripod. :-/

Most of these need some pretty heavy post-processing because the stage lighting, although effective from the standpoint of the human optical system, does not really produce enough lighting for photography.

RAW conversion with an exposure compensation of +1.0 to +2.0 depending on how "dramatic" the lighting for a particular scene was; then I did digital noise reduction on everything just to have everything in one consistent state for final cropping and levels adustment.

Now up...

...VISC Alligators GU-11 soccer, from 11/21/09.

A three-day turnaround. Not bad for having shot 734 original RAW photos.

Whittled that down to 159 tiff's that made the final cut.

That's about 22%.

:-/

Pretty straight forward stuff: EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm; image stabilization on, hand-held.

White balance "cloudy"; ISO 1600; aperture priority auto-exposure (Av) at f5.6; most shutter speeds in the range of 1/320th to 1/800th second; one-shot auto focus with a single, center focus point; focus lock.

RAW conversion with Breeze Browser: smart noise reduction "normal"; white balance "cloudy"; sharpness +4 (as shot +3); exposure compensation in the range of -0.4 to +0.4 as needed.

And it didn't rain.

:-)

Working on...

...a serious web site rebuild.

Basically www.FinchHaven.com started in about 1996 on halcyon.com/~jsage/ (although it wasn't called FinchHaven.com, then) and has been growing (with little-to-no prior planning) ever since.

I registered all the finchhaven.* variants (*.com, *.org, *.net) in 1998.

I've had to change web hosting companies several times because they were cheap and went out of business, once literally in the middle of the night with no prior notice; that time I woke up to find that I had no web site and no email.

So since April of 2004 I've been hosted at Pair.com.

They are not inexpensive, but I've learned the hard way that cheap is cheap for a reason.

Pair.com has excellent customer support the few times I've needed it, and is bullet-proof and rock-steady in terms of uptime.

Last summer I began to work on the one serious downside to Pair.com: being a very prolific photographer, I tend to shoot a lot of events, and take a lot of photographs when I do.

Combine that with the fact that I've never taken anything down that I've put up and I was just about to max-out my current disk space allocation for the hosting plan I had.

The next hosting plan with more disk space was way more money: way more than I could possibly justify spending.

So my brilliant genius son-in-law Bryan suggested that I look into Amazon Web Services, particularly Simple Storage Service, or AWS S3.

"Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers."

Right at the start of last summer I signed up for AWS S3, did a little perl hacking on the user interface aws (also written in perl) from Tim Kay, and now have a series of perl scripts that let me list, put, and delete objects in my "buckets" -- as AWS S3 likes to call them.

This means that from last June onward all my images are stored out in the cloud on Amazon Web Service's S3, while all the html for my web pages is stored on Pair.com.

And this means that I don't have to worry about disk storage space anymore, at all.

Now I'm working on a serious html overhaul, since some of my web pages had grown to over 210k bytes in size, which is embarrassingly obese by web page standards.

Now up...

...VISC Comets GU-12 soccer from 11/14/09.


Pretty straight forward: Canon EOS 5D Mark II with 70-200mm f2.8L zoom and a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length of 98-280mm; image stabilization on, hand-held.

White balance "cloudy"; ISO 800; aperture priority auto-exposure (Av) at f5.6, producing typical shutter speeds of 500th second; one-shot center-point focusing with focus lock.

Now up...

...Raptors v Storm BU-12 soccer shot at night under the lights at McMurray.

I finally decided to add just a touch of digital noise reduction to the post-processed tiff's using Neat Image.

Neat Image uses either canned or self-created profiles of digital noise for specific camera bodies at specific ISO, shutter speed, and f-stop combinations.

I used a profile for my old 5D at ISO 1600, 200th second at f5.6 because it took just a taste of the very little digital noise that came out of my new 5D Mark II at ISO 6400, 200th at f5.6.

Again, the RAW's received exposure compensation of +1.6 during RAW conversion into tiffs, and then I did a little top-end levels adjustment during cropping.

The resulting photos are consistent, if not a little too soft in some cases.

Working on...

...VISC Raptors v Storm BU-12 soccer.

These were shot at night down at McMurray, which does have field lighting, but which does not have any sort of field lighting that a camera can work with, or so you would think.

The lights are only out at the edges of the entire field complex (which has room for one baseball and one softball field, and two soccer fields all at once, and then only on two opposite sides, making for a very hard, directional light that does let people be out there at night, but which provides almost nothing a photographer could really work with.

:-/

First of all, the lights are a really weird color which even the unaided human eye can sense.

I took a wild guess and set my new EOS 5D Mark II's White Balance to "fluorescent", which is 4000K, and which supposedly matches "standard" metal halide lighting.

("Fluorescent" works very well over on the Vashon High School football/soccer/lacrosse field for night sports photography).

Then I needed to deal with the fact that there's simply not much light out there, no matter what it's color. The 5D Mark II was set at ISO 6400 (!), manual exposure (M) of 200th second at f5.6,

Right away during RAW conversion "fluorescent" or 4000K was clearly too yellow, although at that the colors were still off, anyway.

So I did a little tinkering and settled on a manual Color Temperature setting of 3500K as being "good enough" for RAW conversion.

To deal with the lack of light I settled on doing an Exposure Compensation of +1.6 and the resulting photos were at least acceptable to look at and see if there was any soccer action worthy of having been photographed...

So here's a small (600 pixel by 400 pixel at 180ppi jpeg, with no digital noise reduction applied whatsoever:



Remember, folks, this was shot at ISO 6400!

The EOS 5D Mark II is becoming more impressive the more I use it!

Well, that's interesting...

Canon Service Center (as I guess it's supposed to be called) just called (my old 5D died with a "main mirror detachment issue" -- which they're fixing for free) and said that, since my old 5D has over 85,000 (!) shots on it, would I like to replace the shutter and mirror box while it was in for service anyway, which they recommend doing at about 100.000 "clicks" as she called them.

I said "How much?"

She said "About $600.00."

I said "I'll pass..."

Since I've just bought my new 5D Mark II, the old 5D is going to become a backup body/second-lens-mounted body, and I'm not going to sweat 15,000 more shots before it might need to be replaced outright.

Hey! Maybe then I'll get the EOS 1D Mark IV I'm lusting after...

Well...

...just shot VISC Raptors v Storm BU-12 soccer down at McMurray, at night, and there's really no light to speak of as far as cameras go.

'course there are field lights, but the human optic system does wonders with what a camera just laughs at.

So, ISO 6400, manual exposure (M) at 200th second at f5.6.

We'll see tomorrow when I get the RAW files burned to DVD and moved off to a Window$ box to convert and post-process.

First impression: there actually are some images that I'll be able to work with.

Wow!

Just got my first look at the Turkey Trot photos, shot at ISO 3200, and it is absolutely astonishing how noise-free these photos are.

For all practical purposes, viewed at 100% into the embedded jpeg in an unconverted RAW 3861x2574 image, 250th second at f5.6, there is simply nothing that I would call "grain" or "noise".

Nothing.

Here's a random crop into the middle of one random photo, shot at ISO 3200, that's been converted straight-up as shot: no sharpening, no noise reduction, no exposure compensation, just a 100%, 567 pixel by 318 pixel crop right out of the resulting 3861x2574 180ppi tiff, saved as a jpeg, quality level 10:



And for some sort of reference, here's the full size uncropped tiff, just saved as an 800 pixel by 533 pixel jpeg at 180ppi and quality 10:



Can't wait to do the Nutcracker in the Vashon High School Theater in about four weeks!

Just shot...

...Turkey Trot 2009 down at Chautauqua in a pouring rain.

Definitely Kata rain cover time :-/

I'll be very interested to get a look at these photos: they are the first shot I've with the new 5D Mark II at ISO 3200.

Heavy cloud cover, so ISO 3200 and Aperture priority exposure of f5.6 produced (for those I noticed) shutter speeds around 250th to 320th second.

Shooting in the rain with center-point focus and focus lock means I look through all the raindrops on my glasses, look through all the rain drops on the Kata rain cover, wait for the red square to light up, and bang.

For the fun of it...

...I just re-did my Vashon Island Soccer Club home page, and re-emphasized some 2005 gameday photos I took.

Check 'em out and see if you recognize anyone!

Very first impressions:

The EOS 5D Mark II seems to produce a softer image than the original 5D, very subjectively.

This would be for the soccer photos shot yesterday under very flat light because of the heavy cloud cover.

Also (of course, having to always fiddle with something...) I approached focusing differently from how I've set it up in the past, and that may have had something to do with it

I'm dialing-in a little more sharpness than I previously have during RAW conversion, that being turning it up from "3 As-shot" to 4 of 7...

Just shot...

About (I'm not making this up) 1,700 photos at two VISC soccer games today: Comets GU-12, and Pirates FC GU-11.

The deal is that I try to get some shots of *everyone* -- not just the stars, and not just the star moments.

So I take lots of photos.

Also I wanted a lot of photos to look at to see how the new EOS 5D Mark II body is doing.

70-200mm f2.8 zoom with the 1.4x extender, for an effective focal length of 98-280mm.

ISO 800 early on, then to ISO 1600 as some heavier cloud cover came in. White balance "Cloudy". Aperture priority exposure at f5.6, most shutter speeds (that I noticed) > 500th second.

Using center-point auto-focus, AI Focus, with the Auto-Focus Stop button and the AE/FE buttons swapped at C-Fv IV-2, and thus working as a Focus Lock/Stop.

Love the BG-E6 Battery Grip as it lets me quickly roll the camera over to Portrait when the soccer players get right up on me at the side lines, and then quickly roll the camera back over to landscape as they pass by.

Oh yeah: the Comets GU-12 team won 3-nil, and the Pirates FC GU-11 team won by either 3- or 4-nil!

Now up...

Rockbusters Wrestlers 2009, both the wrestler and the team photos..

These came out pretty well, all things considered, that being that they're shot under duress.

Duress being that the coaches want to get this over with as quickly as possible, that I'm working in a small space with 50+ 6- to 11-year-old wrestlers, that there's only enough room for one strobe, and that the floors and lower walls are dark green or a kind of yellow-gold, while the upper walls and the ceilings are yellow-gold (see the Team photos to see what I mean) and the existing lighting are fluorescents that are about nine feet overhead.

Shot with my new EOS 5D Mark II; ISO 200; white balance 5600K to match the single Alien Bees AB800 strobe that was fired into a 60" softbox mounted on a light stand at about chest height; manual exposure at a 60th at f8.0; the strobe is just off my right shoulder and about 10 feet from the subjects for the wrestler shots, and dead-center and back about 18-20 feet for the team shots.

For the wrestler shots the softbox was turned to portrait; for the team shots the softbox was rotated over to landscape and aimed somewhat up at the ceiling.

Just shot...

...Rockbusters Wrestlers with the new Canon EOS 5D Mark II body, and my 24-70mm f2.8L zoom lens.

I'll be looking at the photos in detail tomorrow, but the preview on the Mk II's wider 3.0"/920,000 pixel lcd screen is stunning, to say the least.

The histogram is in color (and can show RGB levels, as well as luminance) and is bright, sharp and clear. Menu-selectable options add display of blown-out highlights, as well as whether the histogram initially shows luminance or RGB levels.

I was using the 5D Mk II with a PocketWizard II Plus wireless transmitter to a second PocketWizard firing a single Alien Bee AB800, which fired into a 60" softbox mounted about chest high on a single light stand.

The single 60" softbox was off my right shoulder, turned to portrait and about 10 feet from the subject, and gave a reasonable amount of relatively soft, well-place light, certainly a big step over on-camera flash (which sucks) but not as good as being able to use two softboxes would have been.

Which would have been impossible: space is a little limited in the wrestling room at the High School to say the least, not to mention that there's roughly 50 little wresters running around at full speed doing warm-ups before their evening's practice, and that I needed to occupy as little of the very tight space as I could.

To do the team shots, I moved the AB800 and the 60" soft box back about 18-20 feet from one wall, turned the softbox itself to landscape and aimed it slightly up at the ceiling, shot from just under its lower left corner, and lit the entire team pretty sucessfully.

We'll see more tomorrow...

Now up...

Halloween on Vashon Island, 2009



The definitive Halloween celebration on Vashon Island is up in town from about 4:00 pm until late (being maybe 7:30 or 8:00 pm, when we roll up the sidewalks).

The Vashon Island Highway is closed through the center of town, and everybody and anybody comes up town to Trick or Treat at all the stores.

Lots of little kids, Chautauqua buddies, McMurray buddies, High School buddies.

It's very cool.

I just got back...

...from Glazer's Cameras in Seattle, and am now the proud owner of a brand new Canon EOS 5D Mark II, body only.

Sure wasn't planning on having to spend this sort of money right now, and I'm sure I'll feel OK about it once I get past my current state of shock.

:-/

And once my original 5D is fixed I'll have a second/backup body, which will be a Good Thing(tm).

Well, the good news is...

...this, I guess.

"Thank you for contacting Canon product support. We value you as a Canon customer and appreciate the opportunity to assist you. We are sorry to hear that the mirror has fallen out of your EOS 5D.

It has come to our attention that in rare instances the main mirror of some EOS 5D Digital SLR cameras may detach due to deterioration in the strength of the adhesive. As a result, Canon USA will repair and reinforce the mirror portion of affected EOS 5D cameras free of charge.

Canon will also cover the cost of shipping and handling in connection with this repair. ..."

They're sorry.

Yeah, not so sorry as me..

Holy Cr*pola, Batman...

...I just had this happen to me tonight at the PTSA-sponsored basketball game down at the High School:

Service Notice: EOS 5D: Main Mirror Detachment

Apparently (well, no: it's obvious) the main mirror that displays the image in the viewfinder of an SLR (and DSLR) camera comes loose from its mount in a Canon EOS 5D, albeit "rarely".

"Phenomenon
The main mirror of the camera detaches and images cannot be viewed through the viewfinder."

I just love the understated quality of *that* statement.

It makes no mention of the fact that the mirror's effectively flopping around loose inside the camera body...

Now up...

VHS Girls' Soccer v CWA, and Senior's Night 2009:


After re-RAW converting all the second half photos (one of them, above) to a white balance of "Fluorescent" rather than "Auto-As shot" the results are much improved in that they're consistent if not 100% "correct".

I think that if the photos had been originally shot with one specific white balance the outcome would be pretty much spot-on.

EOS 5D; 70-200mm f2.8L with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length of 98-280mm; shot at 98mm; White Balance Auto-As shot; Manual exposure 200th at f8.0;

RAW conversion: white balance "fluorescent"; exposure compesation +2; PS levels mid 1.1 high 180-200; fill flash 3 lighter, 35 saturation; Neat Image digital noise reduction 5D @ 1600 ISO 200th f5.6; remove only half of noise

White balance redux...

Just decided to re-RAW convert all the second half VHS Girls' Soccer v CWA photos: kept coming across a few photos where the white balance as first RAW converted (from "as shot Auto White Balance") was so weird that the color rendition was just coming outer space.

:-/

The end product should be much improved.

Girls' Soccer Senior's Night 2009 is up at www.finchhaven.com/vhs/ ... /Girls_Soccer_v_CWA_and_Seniors_Night_102709/Seniors_Night

Now up...

Volleyball v Orting and Senior's Night, 2009.

Here's Rachel with another block:


Canon EOS 5D, 70-200mm f2.8L zoom at 70mm; ISO 1600; "fluorescent" pre-set white balance, Available light; Manual exposure, 200th at f8.0; Auto-focus, center point spot with focus lock.

Heavily post-processed: +2 exposure compensation at RAW conversion; Levels: mid 1.1, high 180-200; Fill Flash +3 and Saturation 35; Neat Image noise reduction at EOS 5d, ISO 1600, "remove half of noise"

Note to self:

Volleyball has *got* to be the hardest sport to photograph.

When you consider that most points are scored in something like seven to eight seconds, that there's six players confined to an area about one-third the side of a basketball court, and that from just about any angle you're either shooting at the players' backs or shooting through the opponents to get to the players' faces, its a wonder that I get anything at all.

And don't get me started about focusing. Center-point auto-focus and focus lock, or manual focus on a generic distance and hope for the best? Neither one works very well.

And then we have the lighting in the Vashon High School gym, which is (let me be charitable, here) horrible.

So basically it's shooting at ISO 1600, manual at 200th, f5.6, and hope I can pull up some kind of an image with exposure compensation during post-processing.

And then after something's light enough to see what I got, maybe it'll be in focus.

Working on...

Putting up Vashon Island Soccer Club GU13 Phoenix and GU12 Riptides

Working on...

Halloween up town in Vashon last Saturday. Got some great shots as the sun went down. EOS 5D; 28-70mm f2.8L zoom at 38mm; ISO 400; Manual exposure: 200th at f5.6; Speedlight 550EX flash on ETTL as fill.

Most Recent...

Halloween up town. Here's UMO at the stoplight working the crowd as a young storyteller finishes her "scary joke":



EOS 5D, 24-70mm f2.8L at 70mm; ISO 800; 200th at f5.6; 550EX Speedlight on Manual. 1/2 power.

More on White Balance...

Here's a shot from Pirates-v-Cedar Park that's been RAW converted two different ways:

1) converted as "fluorescent/as shot" or 4000K


and 2) converted as "tungsten" or 3200K in Breeze Browser, which is what I use for RAW conversion.


Fluorescent definitely looks "better" and more "correct".

On White Balance...

Well, the idea that I'd shoot some photos last night at the Cedar Park game (did I mention that the Pirates won, 59-6? No? Well, they did..) while it was "before it was fully dark" turned out to be nonsense. When I got to the high school at 6:30 pm it *was* dark and the only light was the field lights.

Decided to set the white balance at "fluorescent" or 4000K as a compromise/experiment because that's the same color temperature as "standard" metal halide lights, and I figured that having all the photos shot to the same white balance would be better than "Auto" since if fluorescent was off, I could correct duing RAW conversion.

We'll see: I'm burning the *. Cr2 files to DVD right now...

Next up...

VHS Football versus Cedar Park, tonight at 7:00 pm. Right now the long-range doppler radar looks pretty good. Probably wear my full rain suit but no boots. 70-200mm f2.8 zoom with 1.4x extender for 98mm-280mm effective focal length, probably take my Kata rain hood but hope to leave it in the trunk.

Speaking of white balance: I'm going to do a custom white balance after it gets fully dark: shoot a white card, do Menu > Custom WB and select the white card just photographed, exit the Menu, press and set White Balance to the "Custom" icon.

Before it gets fully dark I'm going to set the White Balance at "Daylight" which is 5200K and see how that works.

Metal Halide lamps seem to run in a range from 2300K for "white corrected" (Often used as accent lighting to blend in with fluorescent 2700K applications) to 4000K for "standard" (Used in general lighting; factories: parking lots, warehouses) to 5500K for "Hylux" (Daylight lamps: horticulture, aquariums, high color definition).

Ref: www.venturelighting.com/TechCenter/Lamps/color_of_light.htm

Quickie Tech Note...

Auto White Balance sucks.

A quick hack to overcome some of the bizarre colors rendered by auto white balance in, say, football photos shot at night in available light under metal-halide field lighting is to select a known white area, copy and paste it into a white_sample.tif, and save that.

Then paste the white_sample.tif into a photo that needs a little help, drag it up to a corner, and flatten layers.

Do an Enhance > Adjust Color > Color Cast (or whatever your specific syntax, you get the idea) on the pasted white sample, and voila!

Quick-and-dirty, and it does an amazingly good job most of the time.

Next shoot...

Halloween night up in town, maybe 4:30 pm 'till who knows when.

Shooting photos of anyone and everyone.

I'll be in costume ;-)

Ask for a free (non-Halloween) scary story!

Hoping to see a lot of my Chautauqua buds!

Next shoot...

VHS Pirates football v Cedar Park, Friday October 30, 7:00pm, VHS Stadium.

Hope the weather won't be too crappy; right now it looks like "Friday: A 40 percent chance of rain. Cloudy, with a high near 57. South southwest wind between 9 and 14 mph." with the chance of rain increasing to 90% Friday night.

Oh well, it can't be as bad as Homecoming...

Can it?

Working on...

VHS Pirates football v Lakeside, October 18, 2009. Pirates win, 44-13. Got some very good offensive and defensive sequences. My sense of timing in shooting football is improving. That, and taking over 900 photos helps...

New photos up...

Vashon Pirates Youth Football from Saturday, October 3

VPYF has taken over the 7th-8th grade football program from McMurray Middle School. These were shot at a home game against Gig Harbor.

Working on...

Vashon Island Soccer Club GU14 (Phoenix) and GU13 (Riptide) soccer from Saturday, October 24; VHS Football from several dates; VHS Volleyball from Thursday, October 21

Basically trying to get caught up :-/

Recent shoot

Tuesday 10/27/09: VHS Girls soccer versus Charles Wright, and Senior's Night. The Pirates won handily 4-0, and I got almost no shots of our keeper because she was so lightly stressed during the match.

EOS 5D, hand-held, available light, ISO 1600, 200th sec at f8.0, 70-200mm f2.8L zoom with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length of 98-280mm.

First Blog!

ha-ha-ha!

That's a /. joke from about maybe ten years ago...