For the first time since Regionals last year, I shot an Ultimate tournament last weekend, or at least one day of it (thanks to Kevin Leclaire for tipping me off that this was happening, I’ve been out of the loop). Yorktown-HB Woodlawn’s program hosted a tournament in Arlington, with teams from Virginia, Maryland and further afar (Pennsylvania and New England) attending. The men’s finals were a familiar story though, with YHB matched up against Woodside, a show I’ve seen before but one that’s always exciting. In the end, YHB prevailed because while Woodside has an incredibly talented and athletic team, they currently have no idea how to play good zone offense, with absolutely no downfield movement. If Woodside wants to contend this year they’re going to need to learn how to pop.
Photo-wise, it was a fine day, a little too sunny for my tastes (harsh shadows etc), but the weather was gorgeous and the action was good. I continued to have autofocus problems with both of my cameras, which is troubling especially after having sent my D300 in for service some time ago. The problem may be in the two (very old, well-used) telephoto lenses I’m using… wonder if I’ll get a chance to send them in for service anytime soon.
I saw some great games at Sunday of the UPA Mid-Atlantic Open Regionals: a final that went to double game point and ended with an upset victory as usually dominant Ring of Fire lost the region (to DC’s Truck Stop) for the first time since 2002, and a 2nd place game that saw Ring almost lose again, this time to fellow North Carolinians Los, but pull out a 15-14 victory after being down 14-12 and 8-5 at half (my favorite play: Los taking half with a cross-field thumber). The 3rd place game for the last bid to nationals was more anticlimactic as it was clear Los was at the end of their emotional and physical rope after losing that heartbreaker to Ring. Pike wins, just like in 2007, but with no epic comeback needed. Man, I feel for those Los guys.
I took 2,000 photos, most of which suck. Seriously, with all the harsh sunlight and the shadows it entailed, I’d have rather just sat and watched. Until someone can figure out how to put a giant diffusion dome on top of an Ultimate field, I’ll always dislike shooting in bright sunlight.
The above sneak preview is Ring getting a huge layout D near Truck Stop’s endzone in the finals. They converted to bring the score back on serve and eventually force double game point. Full coverage up soon at Ultiphotos.
Check ‘em out here at Ultiphotos. There are 1,500 photos all told, about 675 of which are mine. That’s a little overwhelming, so head to the highlights gallery with 320 of our favorites (135 of which are mine).
As I mentioned earlier, I really enjoyed shooting with a 300/2.8, which got me some nice frame-filling action shots and enabled me to throw backgrounds completely out of focus. The above photo, which is cropped only very slightly, is a great example - admittedly, the background at the Uppervile polo fields are close to ideal, with lots of trees and empty fields and few visual distractions. Still, with the 300 wide open at f/2.8, even a parking lot as a background doesn’t get distracting.
This is a new thing I’m going to start doing, which I’m calling 8 fps. I was talking to Kevin Leclaire about how I shoot a lot of bursts when I’m shooting Ultimate, and then when I was scrolling through my photos on my camera, just holding down the button to scan through quickly, I thought it might be cool to put some of the longer bursts together into a kind of stop-motion highlights video. The result of my minimal effort - an hour and half of work - is above. (Note: probably won’t show up in your RSS feed reader, so come visit the site.)
It’s a montage of 68 separate plays, each documented by anywhere from three to ten frames. The whole thing consists of 453 photos shot at 8 frames per second (but played back at 7 fps, as I thought the slightly slower frame rate made things a bit more comprehensible). There are series shot by both my D300 with 300/2.8 and my D700 with 80-200/28. All the photos are completely unedited, because actually editing them would have been way more effort than it was worth. So here’s your chance to see how much of the frame I’m able to fill (or not) when shooting Ultimate. The reality is, as you can see, cropping is often very much necessary.
The logistics of making this video basically involved selecting the photos, resizing them down to a reasonable size for this purpose, doing a quick Photoshop batch process to put the verticals onto horizontal canvases, another batch process to add my watermark, and then using an extremely basic piece of freeware to string them together into a video. Ta-da!
As a final note, the full collection of Sectionals photos will be live at Kevin’s site either later this evening or tomorrow. There’s some great stuff to be seen!
Yesterday I covered, once again alongside Kevin Leclaire, the Ultimate Players Association Capital Mixed Sectional tournament, with my coverage focused on the mixed (coed) division. Sectionals is the first step towards the National Championship tournament in Sarasota in late October. The next step is Regionals, in two weeks, and once again I’ll be there covering Sunday. This is my first time in literally 10 years not playing in the fall club series. It felt kind of weird, but I enjoyed being able to focus, so to speak, on making some great photos. I’ll probably return to playing next year though… I miss it.
Anyway, the full coverage will be at Kevin’s site, Ultiphotos, again. Should be up later this week.
I got my hands on a 300/2.8 AF-S version 1 telephoto lens and used it for the weekend. I had it on a monopod for the first round of games on Sunday (an old Bogen 3018 pod with 3229 swivel/tilt head that I used to use with a manual focus 300/4.5 AIS back when I was first trying to shoot Ultimate in college), but quickly got frustrated by the lack of mobility. By 10am I was handholding it and running around again, with my second body and 80-200/2.8 slung over my shoulder. The two made for a great tandem, assuming I had a few seconds when needed to switch between them. Eight hours of that was pretty tiring to say the least, but it was definitely doable. And the isolation I got from the 300 is absolutely gorgeous. I’ll post an appropriate example soon but the above two shots show it off a bit.
The second shot is just a random non-action capture that I really like. It’s nice to get little shots like this to break up a full day of nothing but action photography.
Sectionals aside, other things I will be covering in the near future, and probably posting about at least a couple of them: lots of concerts. Namely, The Sounds tonight, Sunn O))) on Wednesday, U2 next Tuesday. Also, possibly, because I think it might just be the weirdest spectacle I shoot all year, Lady Gaga next Monday. I had also been planning to shoot Gojira tomorrow, but with the 2,500 photos I took this weekend, I need an extra evening to sit at my computer!
During my busy weekend, I spent a couple hours in Poolesville, Maryland, shooting some Ultimate Frisbee. Specifically, I covered the crossover round of the Open Division and the showcase games of the Elite Division, helping out official tournament photographer Kevin Leclaire. I got some decent stuff, nothing amazing but not too bad considering I hadn’t shot any Ultimate in three and a half months. You can check out my coverage in these galleries at Kevin’s website: crossover games; Ring of Fire vs. Ironside showcase game; Revolver vs. Chain Lightning showcase game.
I think the next time I shoot Ultimate, I’m going to try it with a 300/2.8. I’d like some longer reach and more isolation. Should be fun. I wonder if I can handhold that sucker? I’m usually running up and down the sidelines and don’t really fancy the idea of using a monopod.
I’m always the photographer at Ultimate tournaments and games, never the photographed. So thanks to Kevin Leclaire of UltiPhotos for catching these. I now have photos I can show to my grandkids when I’m 80 to prove to them that once upon a time, gramps was in fact ambulatory. I’m in green, playing in the WAFC Corporate B league finals, which my team won for the fourth year in a row. Our opponents were mostly just-graduated alums of W.T. Woodson high school (plus a couple very good ringers), whose team I photographed at the Virginia high school championships not long ago.
Kevin is a fantastic Ultimate photographer, with a great eye for timing. He shoots with a D300 and 70-300, although for these shots I lent him my 80-200/2.8 as the games were at night, under stadium lighting, and the faster max aperture was a necessity. EDIT: The first pic is a poach D, which explains the odd positioning that confused at least one reader. That actually makes the photo more impressive, as I find poach D’s are usually extremely difficult to predict and catch on camera.
(I cropped and adjusted the exposure and noise reduction characteristics of the photos above with Kevin’s blessing.)
As I’ve completely given up on posting things here in a timely manner, here is something about the youth Ultimate tournament I shot, oh, two and a half months ago.
Ultimate photography is really fun. High school ultimate photography can be really, really fun. Even though the level of play is naturally lower than at the club or college levels, emotions are high - especially at a state championship tournament. Sidelines are jumping up and down, parents are yelling their support, and there’s just generally no shortage of great plays, awesome facial expressions and meaningful team rituals to capture. All that goes to explain how I managed to shoot over 4,000 frames of action at this year’s Virginia high school state championships a couple months ago (yes, this post is very late).
First, a random camera nerd note: the headline photo at the top of this point was taken with a Nikkor 24/2.0 AIS lens on my D700. The 24/2.0 is legendary for not being a great lens, but I loved it when I used it on my old film cameras. Now that I’m used to pro-level modern zooms (just got a lightly used 24-70/2.8!), it’s clear to me that the 24/2.0 is indeed not a technically great performer. The color rendition is particular is kind of weird, but as the photo above shows, it cleans up nicely with a bit of effort in post-processing. Seeing as how I love the 24mm field of view and tons of my photography requires large apertures (either because I shoot in low light or because I tend to like very shallow depth of field), I still think I’ll be getting some use out of this lens. Plus, I really like the heavy, all-metal feel of the old manual focus lenses.
Anyway, the headline photo notwithstanding, for most of the tournament my weapon of choice was the D300, since it gives me a longer reach than the D700. I shot JPEG Large/Fine instead of RAW, since exposure and white balance were both reasonably straightforward and I knew I would have to process a huge number of photos in a very short amount of time. I did run into some minor exposure challenges, though: sometimes when the background was a dark wooded area, the camera would compensate a bit too much and overexpose the shot. As a result, I found myself manually locking down the exposure in circumstances when the light was relatively constant (overcast). Normally I shoot aperture priority for this kind of thing, but switching to manual saved my ass on several occasions.
Like last year, I had the task of trying to cover each of 14 teams on two separate field sites. Manageable, but tiring. Another familiar challenge was the weather, as it rained a bit both days, particularly Sunday. It was enough for me to rig up a plastic bag on my D300 on Sunday, securing it to the camera by pinching it with the eyecup on one end and my lens hood on the other. Hardly the most professional-looking setup, but it worked and stayed out of my way. Rain does look a little weird in action shots using a fast shutter speed though - specks all over the frame:
One thing I learned from one of the “photographers’ tips” features at the ESPN website (it’s a series of videos where ESPN photographers talk about their tricks of the trade) was getting down on one knee to shoot. Rather than shooting field sports from a standing position, getting a lower angle results in more dramatic shots. I spent most of my time shooting down on one knee, at least for action that was relatively close to me. It’s generally a pretty subtle effect, like below. But overall, comparing this year’s shots to last year’s, it definitely makes a difference; everything seems a bit more imposing and in-your-face.
For the girls’ and boys’ finals, I worked much harder than for most of the other games. During most games I positioned myself about two-thirds of the way down the field closer to the team receiving the pull. For the finals, I was running up and down the sidelines to follow the action. Running that much with two heavy cameras is not something I could have done all day for two days, but for one game a day it was more than doable and netted me a lot more great shots than I would have gotten otherwise. Next time, though, I might rent a long longs (300/2.8 or 400/2.8) and use it on one camera body, with my 80-200/2.8 on the other, to save my legs a bit of work.
I liked my action shots but some of my favorites were the sideline emotions. Here’s one of a Woodside player walking back to the line after YHB, the opposing team, scored in the semifinals. At this point in the game YHB was building an insurmountable lead and it had begun to dawn on Woodside’s players that they were not going to successfully defend their title.
And here’s one of Woodside’s coach comforting one of his players after their semifinal loss:
Last year at VA States, I took some 3,000 photos and shared about 800 of them. This year, I took about 4,000 and am sharing about 1,200 of them. That’s a lot of Ultimate photos. They’re all here on my Zenfolio site. Zenfolio allows me to sell prints online (through Mpix - I don’t have to do any printing or shipping myself) as well as digital downloads. I’m very happy with it, will write more in the future.
I’ll also comment a bit more about my experience shooting this tournament, but I think I’ll do that sometime when it’s not 1am and I still have some work to do. For now, enjoy the photos.
It’s probably not very professional to call out crap photography, but, well, I’m not quite a professional :)
This past weekend I was the photog for the Virginia high school state Ultimate championships. (I did this last year too, which is where the above photo comes from. More on this year coming later.) Because of the funky structure of the Ultimate Players Association high school division, this tournament took place a week after the High School Easterns tournament, which is sort of the big championship tournament for all the high schools in the eastern part of the country (there is no true national championship tournament). I saw a link posted to photos from Easterns and, out of curiosity, checked it out. The UPA has a stable of ridiculously talented freelance photographers (forexample) that they contract with for their big tournaments, so the photos are usually worth looking at.
But man, I don’t know if the UPA sanctioned the folks who put up these photos or not, but they are terrible. There was absolutely no effort put into post-processing - no cropping, no contrast adjustments, and some photos were not even rotated to the proper orientation. Even worse, the photos for the most part suck in the first place. There look to be at least two photographers at work here, one of whom is much worse than the other, appearing to use a camera stuck at narrow apertures with from-here-to-infinity depth of field that completely fails to isolate any subject.
Seriously, who is going to buy a 4×6 print of this garbage? I can’t even tell what the subject is supposed to be. And the price? It’s a steal: $12 for two 4×6 prints. Are you kidding me? Those are some of the highest prices I’ve ever seen for something like this, and for this kind of quality it’s a freakin’ joke.
I get that there are economics at work here. Post-processing photos, even just cropping and curves adjustments, is time-consuming, and time is money (or so I’ve heard somewhere before). And putting up as many photos as possible with only minimal standards of quality sometimes makes business sense, since you never know what picture of themselves someone will end up liking (and purchasing). Still, I can’t help but think that shoveling this kind of crap at high schoolers, parents and coaches hoping for some level of professional quality is a real shame. This is a high-level UPA event, after all. In some of the photos you can see the photographers’ booth setup, which looks really nice (it’s in perfect focus because, you know, no subject isolation blah blah blah). Too bad the photos themselves don’t look nice at all.
