Seems I should have...

...done more night photography at the Vashon Island Strawberry Festival this year.


These are from Friday night at Ober Park, the Tom Bean Blues band.


Canon EOS 5D Mark II; Canon 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 70mm; Auto-focus one shot; single-center focus point; ISO 6400; Aperture Value exposure; f3.2 at 200th second; Metering Mode center-weighted average; Auto white balance as shot, but RAW conversion with Tungsten white balance.

The motor-drive...

...sequences I shot at VHS Varsity Boys basketball v Cascade Christian on 12/18/09 seem to be coming out pretty well. I can see issues with consistent focusing within a series of shots: for some reason I shot with "AI Focus Auto-Focus" which is supposed to automatically switch from single-shot AF to AI Servo AF as needed.

Since the subjects in basketball are rarely stationary I have to wonder why I did it this way, but you gotta try stuff to see how stuff works.

Last night at VHS Varsity (both girls and boys) basketball v Charles Wright I shot entirely in "AI Servo ("for Moving Subjects") Auto-Focus" and very quick checks of shots while the game was underway seem to show more consistently accurate focusing through a sequence of shots, even when the subject was covering a big distance across the floor.

I'll know more when I get last night's photos burned onto DVD and get a look at them on the computer...

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.

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!

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!

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.

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...

...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.