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.

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