Saturday, September 15, 2007

My first sports shoot of the season.

Shot Aly's opening soccer game today. The GYSA complex was packed and I saw at least 2 other photog's there with their pro gear shooting games, luckily, I was the only one on my field shooting the game so no competition.
Shooting both teams is quite a bit different than my usual routine of just shooting Aly's team, I was really burning up the memory cards.
While I was initially worried about the geek factor of strapping on both cameras - that feeling quickly went away as I camped out in the only bit of shade on the field, fortunately, it was just off on of the goal boxes. I found myself needing both the 70-200 and the 300mm as the action moved from one end of the field to the other. So I put the 300mm on the 10D and would just switch cameras when the action moved. This was really cool but after shooting with the MkII, that 10D just feels like a snail, it was almost painful waiting for it to finish hunting for focus only then to fire off a few frames and report 'busy' as the buffer is struggles to transfer its contents to the CF card.
The shoot otherwise went really smooth, we got there early enough from me to take some shots with my expo disk for setting white balance later in Lightroom. I also did a little drill I got from Scott Kelby's blog, which basically makes you run through your camera's setup to make sure you're ready before the shoot, to quote Scott:
It’s WHIMS, which stands for:
  • W: White Balance
  • H: Hightlight clipping warning
  • I: ISO
  • M: Mode (JPEG or RAW)
  • S: Shooting (Resetting to the right shooting mode for the subject: Aperture Priorty, Shutter Priority, Manual, etc.)
Things I thought went right to do again:
  • Pre-shoot Expodisk
  • Two camera workflow ROCKS! (just need a faster 2nd body... I wish)
Things to change for next time
  • White balance - take it off auto and fix it at one setting. It may not seem like a big thing since I'm redoing the white balance in Lightroom - I didn't seeing the WB move all over the place on the initial import.
  • Shoot in Manual Exposure - With the weather as good as it is here, and the games only being an hour, I think I'm going to either meter off a grey card or take a light meter and just fix the exposure manual, I found the in camera meter getting thrown by all the bright uniforms.
Thats it, I had fun and most importantly, learned a couple of things alogn the way.

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