Back to Life

I have decided to bring this blog back out of hibernation. A lot has happened since my last real post, on September 7th. I've gotten a lot of new camera gear. I've between my JV football and soccer jobs I've taped 14 games this fall and spent almost 30 hours editing together a season long soccer DVD. O yeah, I've also gotten into college. I will be going to Ithaca College next fall as a TV/ Radio major :).

But this is mainly a photography blog, so that's the first order of business. My camera bag has gotten a lot heavier since my last post, not that I'm complaining. At the time of my last post I had 1 camera, 3 lenses and had a monopod on order. That monopod has come, and I've also added another camera body, another lens and an external flash.

I'll give a brief review of each here, in the order that I got them:

I ordered the monopod, a Gitzo GM 3350XL last summer. After over a month long wait it finally came, thanks B&H for that. It was a very expensive model costing $200. Part of that is warranted; I needed something tall, hence the XL. But there were still several cheaper models that would have worked. I spent the extra money to get a lighter weight version. Theres not a whole lot to say about it, but its awesome. Very sturdy, holds my camera with 70-22 f/2.8 lens attached no problem, it doesn't slip at all. The top screws into the bottom of my camera and its snug. The legs telescope smoothly and tighten nicely. I have no complaints and no regrets about spending that amount of money for something that could have cost half as much.

The next thing I got was a Canon 580 exII flash. Again no complaints. This is the best flash that Canon makes and thus it really does everything you'd want. ETTL works as expected. The flash compensation greatly enhances the ability of the flash and makes it much more useful for differing situations. It is pretty big and heavy, but that's the price that you may for the professional model.

And most recently, in the past week, I got a Canon 7D, along with the kit lens, a 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6. So far it works great. The 7 FPS still photo mode is amazing! I'm going to get a little bit more use out of it before posting an actual review, but I am thinking about that.

I plan on putting the soccer highlight tape that I made online and will post a link to that when it's available.

I have decided to put this blog into hibernation. I am way to busy this fall, with photography, TV production and college applications to have time to keep up with this. I plan to pick it up again sometime later in the winter.

Recent Sports Pics

Here are links to the soccer game I shot this afternoon and the football game I shot last night:

Soccer

Football

Soccer Photos

Now you finally get to see what I had planned on making one of the key features of this blog: some of my sports photos. Here are the shots from a boys soccer game I shot last weekend.

I'm actually not very happy with the way they turned out. The color varies a lot between the pictures, probably the result of using 2 cameras at the same time. Another thing that made it hard was the time. A 6:00 game start time means that at the beginning of the game it is bright and sunny, but by the end it is 100% night. That means that I have to constantly be monitoring the settings, for 2 cameras, and they don't use equivalent settings. What produces a perfect exposure on the Canon might be over exposed on the Nikon.

I think for the majority of the time I had my ISO set to low. The ISO is the camera setting that sets the sensors sensitivity to light (that's a mouthful). A low ISO, 100-200 means that the sensor isn't very sensitive and a longer exposure is needed to get picture that is exposed properly. That's fine if it is bright outside and the subject isn't moving fast. Add in moving soccer players at night and you have a mess. A higher ISO is needed, but not to high or the camera starts to produce noise on the photos. Noise is the little dots on some pictures. Generally not desired, especially for sports.

So, I had the ISO set to low throughout the night, which leads to longer shutter speeds which means there is going to be blur from the fast moving players. Which leads to a bunch of bad pictures.

An alternative is to use a flash, but I don't think many people would like a flash going off in the middle of a sports game, so that is out of the question in this case. The best solution I have found, I hope, is a monopod. It's kinda like a TRIpod, but unlike the tri part it is mono. It is basically a long metal stick that screw onto the bottom of the camera and sits on the ground. It's supposed to help hold the camera steady.

Hopefully by the next soccer game I have to shoot the monopod that I ordered in mid August will be here, yeah you read that right, over a month. I'll post a review of it as soon as I use it a couple of times.

Here is another photo website that I read on a daily basis. It's much more about gear and shooting techniques, but since pretty much everyone has a camera or sorts it could be useful, or just interesting:

http://photofocus.com/

My Take on Editing Photos

What is the difference in the pictures above? The short answer is the top one is much, much better. And it didn't take long to change something like the bottom shot into something much better like the top one. Simply spending 30 seconds editing each photo will make them all much better. When I take a picture I not only notice how good or bad what I see on the back of the camera is, I think about how I can edit it; either to be printed in the paper or to be used for personal use.

Anything that is to be printed in the paper or put on stoganews.com must be in good photo journalistic taste. It must be a true representation of what actually happened. This can sometimes be difficult because the human eye can see more contrast then the best cameras can capture, ie. the human eye sees deeper blacks and whiter whites then a camera does. This can make it hard because a picture taken isn't really what happened. Some basic edits can be made to increase the contrast; the main one being a levels adjustment.

Anything that isn't going to be print I am free to do whatever I want with, as I have done many times on this blog. Often times if I get a picture out of the camera that isn't very good, like above, I play around to try to make it more creative. One of the first things I try is making it high contrast black and white, as the one above is. This is super simply to do and is a style that I really like. It takes the emphasis off of the color and puts much more emphasis on what the picture is actually of.

If the black and white doesn't look good next I try adding some color. Like this. If that still doesn't look good, then chances are the photo isn't very good to start with and it get trashed. All of these editing styles are just ways to make a photo go from a limited contrast capture, because a camera can't capture as much as your eye can see, to a basically enhanced photo, like the pictures to be printed, to something much more creative, like the black and white above. Before trashing any picture it is worth trying several different edits on it, they don't have to be complex and don't take very much time at all. As a point of reference the black and white photo wasn't edited in Photoshop, it wasn't even edited in Aperture or Lightroom. I edited it in iPhoto, the free photo organization software that comes with the Mac, that happens to have some basic photo editing tools that are at best not very good and at worst they are probably worse then some editing software on the iPhone.

That just goes to show that to make some basic photo enhancements you don't need Photoshop or something like that. Most editing can be done in something simple. And it is always worth the time to do that editing.

A Photo Website Everyone Should Look At

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/in_flight.html

No I didn't take that picture. And no its not a crash. They are the Spanish Air Force aerobatic team. I'm guessing similar to the Blue Angels, though they look to be a little bit better. The picture is from The Big Picture Blog. It has some of the coolest pictures I've ever seen, most of them photojournalism shots. I highly recommend checking it out sometime.