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...