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.

File and workflow management...

...have become the major new issues now that I'm shooting with my new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, and in fact for major sports events, shooting with both the 1D M4 and with my EOS 5D Mark II as well.

For field sports the 1D M4 has the 70-200mm f2.8.L zoom, often with the Extender EF 1.4 II for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm, while the 5D M2 has the 24-70mm f2.8L zoom for closeups.

Setups for both cameras is as identical as I can get it regarding ISO, White Balance, Exposure Mode, Metering Mode, and Focusing Mode and focus point.

Since I'm shooting in Continuous Shooting mode while the game is underway the 1D M4 is taking something less than 10 shots per second, while the 5D M4 is taking something less than 4 per second.

I'm shooting in M-RAW on the 1D M4 which is spec'ed at "9.0 mB 3672x2448" and in S-RAW-1 on the 5D M4, which is spec'ed at "9.9 mB 3861x2574".

Despite the fact that Canon says both of these produce files roughly in the 9.0-10.0 mB range, most of the RAW files I get seem to end up somewhere north of 15 mB each.

Go figure.

So I shot 2,341 photos in a Saturday of Vashon Island Soccer Club games.

(As a matter of policy I shoot *everyone* -- not just the "star" players -- on any team I photograph).

That comes out to 38.26 gB (that's gigabytes, folks) of photos as they came off the Compact Flash cards and onto a hard drive.

So my old method:

1) move Canon RAW files from CF card to hard drive on a Ubuntu Linux box,
2) burn to DVD,
3) copy off the DVD onto the hard drive on one of the two Win XP boxes I use for post-processing,
4) post-process on the Win XP box,
5) generate jpegs and web pages back on the Ubuntu Linux box that contains the local copy of my web site,
6) archive the DVD

has become:

1) move Canon RAW files from CF card to hard drive on a Ubuntu Linux box I'm now using as a file server,
2) review and tag acceptable RAW files over the network from a Win XP box,
3) move the tagged files to a new directory on the file server,
4) post-process the tagged RAW files over the network from a Win XP box,
5) generate jpegs and web pages on the Linux box that houses my web site,
6) delete unused RAW files that never made the cut, and
7) burn the tagged RAW files and the tiffs produced by post-processing onto a DVD for off-line archiving

It's taken a little thinking and fiddling to get this down and streamlined, but so far it seems to be working.

And it may be more separate steps, listed out like this, but in actual practice doing RAW conversion and post-processing using two instances of BreezeBrowser running on each of two Win XP boxes means I'm really able to keep things moving.

And one major advantage is that I'm no longer even keeping photos that never make the cut, which I did in the old method.

Although I'm paying only about $0.66 per DVD/c-shell case for storage, I don't need to keep something I've only looked at once and will never look at again...

Well, I've really...

...gone and done it now.

Ordered and received a new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV.

"Wow! You must be selling a lot of photos to be able to afford something like that!"

uhh.. no.

Or, well, business is OK, particularly considering the economy, but basically I have no hope whatsoever that the 1DM4 will ever pay for itself -- maybe -- I just hope I can do OK enough to keep on top of the credit card payments.

:-/

What has happened is that since I quit working for the Vashon School District last October and got into photography full-time I've been shooting a lot of sports, and shooting more and more in Continuous Shooting (oldtimers would call it "motor-drive") Drive Mode.

Shot a *lot* of basketball, lacrosse, baseball and soccer last winter and spring.

And what I kept seeing over and over again is, in it's simplest, the fact that four frames per second* (which is what my EOS 5D Mark II can do) is just not fast enough to shoot sports.

I mean, you get good photos, but when I'm doing RAW conversion I keep seeing that the one or two shots that I might have got in between the ones I *did* get would have been the ones I really wanted.

Not the shooter's arm coming up for the shot, or the basketball gone and on it's way to the basket, but the one or two shots where the ball is just coming off the shooter's fingertips.

Not the lacrosse stick back over the shoulder, or the lacrosse stick out at full extension toward the goal, but the one or two shots where the lacrosse ball is just coming out of the pouch.

Not the soccer ball several feet up over the player's head, but the one or two shots where the soccer ball is sitting right on his forehead as the player heads the ball.

You get the idea.

Now, granted that motor-drive mode is just a crap-shoot anyway: you press the shutter, the camera starts recording images at a (relatively) set interval, and hopefully one or two of them will be taken at The Moment(tm).

You'd think that four frames per second would be enough, but sports is really fast.

So after having spent the winter and spring constantly fretting about the shots I *should* have gotten but didn't, I finally decided to jump into the issue with both feet.

So, we'll soon see: fall sports (Vashon High School football, girls' soccer, volleyball, boys' tennis) starts in about two weeks.

Also to be seen: whether or not Canon has solved the significant AI Servo auto-focus issues that plagued the Canon EOS 1D Mark III.

Stay tuned! It should be an interesting fall...



* All references to frames per second for the 5D Mk II and the 1D Mk IV are using a UDMA 6 Compact Flash card -- Sandisk "Extreme Pro" 16GB compact flash cards, in fact