Tried something a little...

...different for the Vashon High School Cross Country meet on Thursday, October 7, 2010.



I wanted to shoot something other than the finish line, something other than winners (one) and losers (many).

The Vashon High School XC course is laid out on the Vashon School District campus: the start is over at the High School, goes off into some woods on the east side of the campus, comes back onto the Chautauqua Elementary School playground along the edge of the woods, goes across the Chautauqua playfield, onto the jogging track that goes around the McMurray Middle School playfield, back over to the High School, and starts another lap. Two laps total; I think it's something around 2.5 miles.

I knew of a really neat spot on the edge of the Chautauqua playfield where the runners would be skirting the woods and then climbing a very short hill to come up onto the playfield, which continues on gently uphill to the jogging track.

Heavy woods in the background, bushes and roots and stuff to run around, up the incline which is infrequently mowed grass, and onto the playfield which is mowed.

Anyhoo, the idea was to shoot with a very slow shutter speed (1/15th, finally 1/30th second) and pan with the runners as they ran across my field of view and climbed the short hill up onto the playfield.

I was using my EOS 1D Mark IV and the 70-200mm f2.8L zoom, no extender, in AI Servo Autofocus mode and High Speed Continuous Shooting mode, which should approach 10 frames per second if it's not obsessing too much about maintaining focus.

I shot 881 frames total, of which only 196 (!) were even acceptable enough to make the first cut, and ended up using only 77 (!!).

In post-processing I used the Lasso Tool to select those areas of the face and jersey that were in focus and applied a little Unsharp Mask to the selection to sharpen the features I wanted to emphasize.

All-in-all I'm pretty happy with how they came out.

There is an immediate answer...

...to the weird lighting in the Vashon High School gym issue.

That issue was the apparent fact that at a shutter speed of 250th sec and up it's quite possible to capture the changing light output/light color as the metal halide gym lights cycle on-and-off-and-on at 120 hz or 120 times a second.

Consider the following, as-shot:



ISO 12,800, 400th second at f5.0, Auto White Balance.

Not bad, really, and maybe some snapshot-shooters would be satisfied, but to me it's way, way too cool and bluish.

(I've been researching the detailed EXIF data for Canon EOS 1D Mark IV RAW files, and I have yet to figure out just exactly how Canon encodes the white balance data for a photo shot on "Auto White Balance". It's got to be in there somewhere, but currently I'm thinking it's not expressed in degrees Kelvin but rather in an RGGB quadruplet, which I have yet to find/decypher).

Merely doing the RAW conversion with the White Balance set to Fluorescent (approximately 4000 degrees K) improves the photo quite a bit:



except that now it's too yellow-y and the skin tones are too flat.

So, clicking on "More settings" brings up the "Additional Settings" (!) dialog, where we can fiddle with all sort of stuff.

We've got a Blue B9 ... B3 ... 0 ... A3 ... A9 Amber slider, a Green G9 ... 0 ... M9 Magenta slider, and a "Color Tone" drop-down -- which is actually Reddish skin tone -4 ... 0/as-shot ... +4 Yellowish skin tone range -- to play with.

Remember since we're talking about light, we're talking Additive Color here.

Take a look at the Additive Color wheel and green is opposite magenta (which is the combination of red and blue) while blue is opposite yellow ("amber" here) -- yellow being red and green combined.

Which is why our pairings here are "blue" to "amber" and "green" to "magenta".

Why "skin tone" rather than a "red" to "cyan" pairing? I'd guess that a lot of real-world photography has a greater need of fiddling with skin tone rather than fiddling with colors ranging from red to cyan. Also, "skin tone" is a specific adjustment in the Canon EOS Picture Style system, which is what we're really doing here: making micro-adjustments to Canon RAW files before we convert them to tiffs.

Anyhoo, when I pull over the Blue to B5, and dropped down the Skin Tone to -4 Reddish, I get something that I like better, at least, than any other setting.

The floor particularly has lost a little yellow, the skin tones look a little more alive, the green of the uniforms seems to have a little more pop, and we're good to go.

(Note that despite all the sliders and pull-down dialogs this all ends up being really subjective, and also implies a calibrated monitor, which I have).



Here's the finished product:



So to correct the weird lighting issues from the volleyball match I shot in the Vashon High School gym I ended up fiddling with the Blue-Amber slider particularly, added in a touch of Magenta on a couple, and pulled up or down the Skin Tone a taste on a few.

And they came out OK, at least as OK as I was willing to spend time with them.

The real test will be photographing the next VHS volleyball match this coming Friday.