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Archive 2014 · My first HS football game.

  
 
ronlane
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · My first HS football game.


A couple of my favorites from my first time to photograph a HS football game.

1) This is going to hurt.



MWC-IKE-17 by Ron_Lane, on Flickr

2) Breaking loose?



MWC-IKE-13 by Ron_Lane, on Flickr

3) Touchdown catch



MWC-IKE-24 by Ron_Lane, on Flickr



Sep 28, 2014 at 08:29 AM
jonnyt5050
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · My first HS football game.


Hi Ron,

I've never shot football so I can't provide a ton of good tips/advice. But the exif shows you had a 70-200/F4 lens so it looks like you could really use a faster lens (aka F2.8). That would allow you a shorter depth of field and would allow you to back off your ISO by a full stop as well. And really, those are the two things that stand out to me more than anything (too many back ground distractions and high noise).

But as Rumsfeld might say... you go to photograph with the lenses you have. Not the lenses you might like or wish to have.

All that being said, #3 is my favorite.

All for now. Happy shooting!



Sep 29, 2014 at 08:34 PM
JimBowman
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · My first HS football game.


Ron:

I am going with Jonny on this one because I know what it is like to have to use what you have not what you wish you had.

Here are a few tips from a non-pro that might help out. I don't know what software you have to edit in post-prod so bear with me here:

#1 pump up the shadows and noise reduction in post. You will end up with a slightly softer image but without the speckled noise. Crop it a bit tighter by taking out the black up top that really shows the noise levels.

#2 Take the exposure down just a notch or tone down the highlights/white to take down some of the white in the jerseys - they just look too bright to me even though I am sure it's close to actual color. Dump the grass in the foreground - try and avoid using the field as filler in the image.

#3 Crop the top section of the photo out for the same reasons as #1. See if you can lose the shadows in the bottom of the image and take the exposure down just a touch to deal with the glare off the white jersey.

Hopefully this is helpful to you in some way. Even shooting with non-pro lenses sometimes you can make out in post-prod editing on a few shots where the light was just right and the ISO is cranked way up. I think #2 is a great example of that condition. Keep at it and stick around here there are tons of helpful and knowledgeable pros always willing to provide advice - everything I know I learned here and in the field (trial by fire...).

--Jim



Sep 29, 2014 at 10:13 PM
ronlane
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · My first HS football game.


Thank you both for your input. You are correct, in a perfect world, I would have a 70-200mm f/2.8 but as it stands I only have the f/4 version.

I noticed that these did not look as good on screen as the did in LR so I went back and looked at them. I made some edits that you suggested and did some cropping. I noticed that when I exported them from LR, I added sharpening and I had used Nik collections to sharpen them already, so that was one mistake.

I will be reloading the edited files soon.



Sep 30, 2014 at 06:16 AM
rolette
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · My first HS football game.


You shouldn't take the originals down. Folks other than yourself learn from the critique and feedback that people give. It takes away significantly from the effort people put in to provide C&C.


Sep 30, 2014 at 06:26 AM
ronlane
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · My first HS football game.


The originals are still above. Here are the edits. Still plenty of room to improve my skills but I'll take this for a first effort.

1) This one is still noisy on here, for some reason, it doesn't look like this in LR or when I export it. I'm not sure what's going on.



MWC-IKE-17 by Ron_Lane, on Flickr

2)



MWC-IKE-13 by Ron_Lane, on Flickr

3)



MWC-IKE-24 by Ron_Lane, on Flickr



Sep 30, 2014 at 08:02 AM
JimBowman
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · My first HS football game.


Ron:

I forget which key it is in LR but it will show you white blowout. Here is a quick tutorial (first I found and briefly looked through it) on how to correct this:

http://www.clickinmoms.com/blog/lightroom-tutorial-how-to-recover-blow-outs-by-editing-in-layers/

The basic premise is there. My suggestion is to create a virtual copy of the image within LR and then play with this to compare the two images as you are working on the whites. It's really tough to see it until you have seen it corrected. I actually hit the hotkey in LR once and saw red all over my screen - this is when the lightbulb went on to show me what was going on.

In the tone area I would move the shadows/black to the left a bit to see if that blackens out the sky in the background which can get rid of the noise in #3 to really make the player pop out of the picture.

#1 may just be too much noise to recover it if it was shot in jpeg. Had plenty of these and sometimes it's best to just toss it and keep the keepers.

#2 is significantly better and it may just be my screen or my preferences but the whites still seem a bit overexposed.

What do you think of the changes you made? Do you see improved pictures? I would keep making virtual copies on your system to see the differences between the original and the tweaks you make. To me that is the best learning tool within LR without worrying about having to reset the entire image =)

--Jim



Sep 30, 2014 at 08:20 AM
ronlane
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · My first HS football game.


Thanks Jim, I did see the difference. None of these images have any highlights clipping, or if it is, it is a tiny dot in the reflection on the helmets. I do watch that and it is the alt key plus the whites.

They all have the shadows clipping in them but I'm okay with that.

Each of these edits, I went a 1/3rd of a stop underexposed to pull back the brightness.



Sep 30, 2014 at 09:23 AM
docsmiles17
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · My first HS football game.


I can't see the originals either so its impossible to comment on any improvement. Most of the exif data is wiped out as well so ISO, camera type, settings are unknown also. You will get much better feedback if you keep both the above in your post and images.

However from the shots available, the noise in #1 is too high and I, personally, would deem it a non-keeper. In #2, background is distracting but noise is acceptable. #3 is noisy but not as bad as #1



Sep 30, 2014 at 12:59 PM





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