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Shooting field hockey: best lens and camera position

More photos here: http://ow.ly/CEMyg


I was taking photos of our university’s women’s field hockey game last two weekends, and as an experiment, I shot each of them with a different lens.

Shooting field hockey is challenging for couple of reasons. First, the field is relatively small and it is enclosed by a fence, so on one hand, the action can come very close to the camera very quickly, and on the other hand, it is difficult to isolate the players from the background if they are at the opposite end of the field from the camera.

The second challenge is that the players are crouched down while fighting to control the ball, so if the light is harsh, as the daytime sunlight often is, the players’ faces are covered by deep shadows.

Third, the colour of the artificial turf is bright green, which creates an unpleasant cast on the faces of the players, as they bend down, looking at the ball.

The first challenge of the wide range of distances from the action can be overcome by using an appropriate lens. I shot my first game of this season with a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM. I has a good zoom range, which is great to have when the action is close, it focuses very fast and it is relatively light. I had the lens mounted on a Canon EOS-1D X and carried it on a Y-strap. It was so easy to handle that I was convinced that if I had a single lens to choose, the 70-200mm f/2.8L would be it. Its only drawback is insufficient focal length for far-away shots, such as action at the opposite end of the field and close-up shots of the players celebrating the goals.

More photos here: http://ow.ly/CEDsM


The next game, one week later, I shot with a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens, and the success rate of interesting shots was much higher than I expected. In fact, I had to revise my opinion on what would be a single go-to lens for field hockey. The 300mm f/2.8L is at least a very close contender, if not the winner of that title, in my opinion. There are a couple of disadvantages of this lens: fixed focal length and weight. Both are manageable, though. The challenges in composing shots due to the absence of zoom can be overcome with practice. It took me about one season of shooting to become comfortable with the 300mm. I must add that I am deeply grateful to Armando, who gave me a free run of using his lens, for making this experience possible. The weight of the lens is also not prohibitive for using it hand-held. More importantly, I believe the interesting shots 300mm f/2.8L produces are worth the inconveniences.

To handle the lighting, I think the best angles with respect to the sun are either direct light, where the sun is behind the camera, or backlight, where the sun is behind the subject. The direct light is a bit flat, but produces bright, saturated colours of the players’ uniforms. The backlight produces low contrast and saturation, but creates very pleasant rim light effect on the hair of the players.

Note: The artificial turf is soaked with water before each game, so when its surface is struck with a stick, or even with players feet, a spare of small water droplets is produced. To capture it, a fast shutter speed (minimum of 1/1000 sec) works best. Also, the spray looks very nice when backlit.

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Photographing fireworks on Bastille Day in Paris

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité


My work as an engineering professor often takes me to fascinating places for conferences and research collaborations. This is a great opportunity for photography. The only drawback is that usually I have no control of the time of the year when I visit a certain location. But sometimes, everything aligns beautifully. For example, last year’s conference in Paris could not have occurred at a better time – it started right after the Bastille Day (July 14), which happened to be a Sunday. My wife, daughter (1.5 years old at the time) and I arrived before the weekend and had a chance to explore Paris, which was getting ready for the festivities.

On the 14-th, we walked along Champ de Mars in the afternoon, took the obligatory family shot in front of the Eiffel Tower and scouted the location for photographing the fireworks, which were happening at 10 o’clock that night.

In the evening, the family stayed in the hotel, and I took a 30-minute metro ride to Champ de Mars, arriving there at about 5:30 pm. I was carrying my camera bag with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, the lenses (70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM and Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L USM), a remote switch cable and a tripod. The whole field (Champ de Mars is huge, by the way) was packed with people, standing, sitting, laying down so close to each other, there were not many places to even stand, not to mention setup the camera. Nevertheless, I picked a spot at the centreline of the field, right at the edge farthest from the Eiffel Tower, and waited until the crowd shifted enough so I could set my camera bag on the ground. Then waited a bit more (I did have more that four hours before show after all, so waiting was not a problem) and unfolded the tripod over the bag, trying to minimize my footprint.

Immediately, people who were sitting on the ground behind me informed me in broken English with a charming French accent that “It would be better for us if you were not standing there.” I assured them that I would not be standing there all four hours before the fireworks – I was going to sit down next to them and enjoy watching the crowd. That seemed to satisfy them, we introduced each other, shook hands, chatted about the Tower (“how beautiful she is”), Paris, photography, work and children. During the next four hours, as the sun was setting, I snapped a few pictures and showed them (on the camera’s LCD screen) to my new friends, who apparently also were photography enthusiasts, but were a bit limited by their pocket cameras and lack of a tripod.

The fireworks and the light and sound show were simply amazing. The energy of the crowd was exhilarating. As a bonus, I managed to take a few good pictures. All this gave me enough emotional boost to be in high spirits when I returned to the hotel after walking with the crowd, carrying my my heavy gear, for two hours after the show (the metro was closed, as it was not feasible to accommodate the masses of people that gathered for the celebration). This is when I appreciated, once again, that my tripod was made of lightweight carbon fibre.

Bastille Day fireworks. Paris, France.


As for photographing the fireworks themselves, the technique that works well for me is this:

  • Set the camera on the tripod.
  • Manually focus on infinity.
  • Set the camera to “Bulb” mode (where the shutter speed is manually controlled by pressing and releasing the shutter button).
  • Set ISO to 400 and aperture to f8.
  • Use a remote release cable to trigger the camera when the fireworks begin. Experiment with different timing relative to the explosions and different shutter opening times. I find that shutter speeds from 1 to 6 seconds work well (I count “twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, …” to get the approximate timing).

Note: If the photos look good when played back on the LCD screen of the camera, they would be too dark when displayed on the computer later. This is because the LCD appears extremely bright when viewed at night – just something to be aware of.

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Sport photography: noise reduction in post-processing

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Sports photography often requires very fast shutter speeds in order to freeze the action. In my experience, a minimum of 1/800 sec is required for basketball or soccer. My typical setting, which I save as a custom function in the camera is 1/1000 sec. Since lighting is often quite dim, particularly during indoor events or night games, fast shutter speeds require very high ISO settings, even with “fast” lenses (i.e. lenses that have large maximum aperture). As a result, the images become quite noisy, even when shot with state-of-the-art cameras, such as Canon EOS 5D Mark III or Canon EOS-1D X (in the Nikon world, there are counterparts such as Nikon D800 and Nikon D4S).

Noise becomes more noticeable when viewed at high magnification as random variations in brightness and colour between neighbouring pixels. These variations can be smoothed out in post-processing using fairly sophisticated algorithms implemented in various image-editing software. However, ultimately, this noise reduction causes loss of detail, which appears as lack of sharpness.

The good news is that in sports photography, relatively high levels of noise are considered acceptable. In fact, certain amount of noise adds character to the photo and conveys the sense of extreme effort exerted by the athletes.

Also, noise reduction is not nearly as destructive to the sharpness of the photo if the image is down-sampled (reduced in size) to be shown as a thumbnail on screen, for example. The counter-intuitive fact is that when the size (in pixels) of an image is reduced, the apparent sharpness is increased. This is because the small details that are lost due to noise reduction processing would not be visible anyway in the small image, so it appears both sharp and with low noise. The same is not true about the noise level, however. When the image size is reduced, the apparent noise is at best appears the same and often looks more pronounced than in the original, high-resolution photo.

Here are my typical strategy for noise reduction in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, where I do most my post-processing. The Noise Reduction panel of the Develop module offers separate control of two main types of noise: Luminance and Color. Each of those has additional aspects, which can also be controlled separately (detail and contrast for Luminance and detail and smoothness for Color), but I almost never use them. I find the colour noise more unpleasant than the luminance noise, but it is also better controlled by the camera, so I rarely have to correct for it. I only work with Luminance slider for most of my photos.

  • If the noise level is relatively low, I find that Luminance settings between 0 and 10 (in some arbitrary units used by Lightroom – they are really just relative indicators of the amount of noise reduction applied) do not cause visible loss of sharpness.
  • If the noise is extreme, I set Luminance to around 30 and sometimes up to 50. Above that, the loss of detail is quite severe, and would be noticeable if the image is reduced in size.

More photos here: http://ow.ly/Ci0o7

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Image editing: an easy way of applying adjustments to a selected area

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One of the most basic, but most useful techniques that I use in Adobe Photoshop is applying an adjustment only to a part of the photo. There are many different ways of doing this, but the procedure described below bypasses a tedious selection of of the small details of the area that needs to be adjusted.

Let’s consider the photo of the young dancer above as an example. Suppose that we want to increase the exposure of the girl, but leave the background as is. Note that increasing the exposure here is just an example of an effect. Similar things can be done with saturation, contrast, blur or other effects. The point is to show how to apply the effect selectively. Here is the set-by-step procedure:

1. Open the file on Photoshop. The image will be place on the background layer of the Photoshop document (as shown in the Layers panel at the bottom right of the Photoshop window).

Screenshot 2014-10-15 22.30.34



3. In the Curves Properties window that appears, click in the middle of the curve and drag the handle that appears upward. This makes the entire image lighter, but at this point, consider only the dancer’s figure and mentally ignore the background – it will be excluded later. Also, you don’t have to be very precise with the degree of the adjustment either – it can be easily tweaked later (see step 7).

Screenshot 2014-10-15 23.07.37


4. Select the layer mask of the curves layer and press CTRL-I. This fills the layer mask of the Curves layer with black colour, hiding all adjustments.

Screenshot 2014-10-15 23.28.18


5. Select a soft round brush bush and with the layer mask selected paint with white colour, revealing the areas that are supposed to be affected by the Curves adjustment.

Couple of notes:

  • I use a pressure-sensitive Wacom Intuos Pro graphics tablet for these edits – it makes an enormous difference compared to using a mouse. In fact, I would not attempt this with a mouse, unless there would be no tablet available.
  • There is a very useful keyboard shortcut for changing size and hardness of the brush: With the brush tool active, press Shift-Option (or Alt)-Control and drag left-to-right to adjust size or drag top-to-bottow to adjust hardness. A red image of the brush will appear to serve as a visual guide for these adjustments.
  • There is no need to be very precise at this step. If you paint part of the background next to the girl, just ignore it – it will be taken care of at the next step. If you make an obvious huge mistake, paint the area black to hide the Curves adjustments there.

6. Now, the roughly painted-in selection can be refined in one easy step. There is no need to spend time selecting every individual hair around the dancer’s head, etc.

Instead, Double-click on the Curves adjustment layer anywhere to right of the layer mask. This opens a Layer Style menu.

At the very bottom, where it says “Underlying Layer”, press Alt (or Option) and click on the left (black) handle. This slits the handle in half; drag the right half to the right while observing the effect of the photo. Doing so makes the the Curves adjustment layer visible only in the areas where the underlying layer is brighter. Incidentally, if you Alt (Option)-click the right (fray) handle and drag one half of it to the left, you make the adjustment layer visible in the areas where the underlying layer is lighter. Once you’ve adjusted the slider position(s) to achieve the desired effect, click “Ok” in the Layer Style menu.

Screenshot 2014-10-15 23.57.12


7. If the adjustment is too strong, it can be tweaked again in theCurves Properties menu – you can open it by double-clicking the Curves adjustment layer just to the right of the visibility icon, which looks like an eye. Alternatively, you can adjust the opacity of the entire adjustment layer to mute its effect.

Screenshot 2014-10-16 00.20.11


8. This is it! Go to File > Save as… and save the file in a format that you need.

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On imperfect conditions

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“It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.”

– Stephen King, “On Writing.”

I wrote in this earlier post on waterproof gear that bad weather often makes good photos. In fact, incorporating weather (read:bad weather, form a conventional viewpoint) in a photo is almost a requirement in some genres of modern photography. Indeed, Ansel Adams is arguably the most famous photographer ever mostly because he was ahead of his time by using weather elements in his landscapes. Nowadays, every landscape photographer does it.

However, it is not just imperfect weather conditions that promote creativity. Other challenges are also very effective in developing a photographer’s skill. For example, shooting in low light is challenging, but the results are usually worth the effort.

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Likewise, shooting sports action is difficult because of the fast, unpredictable movement of the athletes, lack of control over light, etc. For a while, I was using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II as my main camera and felt that the low framing rate and slow autofocus were really limiting the success rate of my shots. After upgrading to the unbelievably fast Canon EOS-1D X , I can definitely say that my experience with the 5d Mark II was very valuable, as it taught me to determine the characteristic moments of the action, whether it is basketball, soccer, rugby or swimming. If I didn’t have the sense of those decisive, characteristic moments for each sport, it would have been tempting to just let the 1Dx rip at 12 frames per second from the beginning of each play until the end. This would have left me with tens of thousands of poor images, among which it would have been impossible to find a single good one, that would tell the story of the game.

More photos here: http://ow.ly/Ci0o7


So in order to improve at photography, I try to:

  • Shoot challenging subjects;
  • Shoot in difficult light and poor weather;
  • Practice with whatever gear we have to find out the limits of a particular piece of equipment – it makes the new gear, when it becomes available, much more effective.

 

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Using crop tool to improve composition

Ukai
Often, it is not possible to perfectly compose the photo at the moment of shooting. This is particularly true for action photography, but it is quite common in most real-life situations when we don’t have total control of the model, the background and/or have limited time to take the shot.

Post-processing can dramatically improve a photo, and one adjustment that has the highest impact is cropping. Cropping affects composition, which is the most fundamental element of a picture. It allows us to emphasize the subject and remove non-essential or distracting parts. In Adobe Lightroom, the crop tool located at the very top of tool panel in the “Develop” module. This is not a coincidence. The tools are laid out in the order of the recommended (read: common) post-processing workflow, where the most important, high-impact adjustments are made first.

Recently, I have been taking increasingly more pictures with my iPhone. Before sharing them online, I often make some rough adjustments using the editing mode of the built-in Photos app. Cropping is usually one of them. Here is what I typically do to improve composition:

  1. Straighten horizon.
  2. Cut off unnecessary/distracting elements that do not contribute to the story I am trying to tell in the picture. When in doubt – crop tighter.
  3. Try to use “the rule of thirds” (position the mail element of the picture at the intersection of imaginary vertical and horizontal lines that divide the width and the height of the picture into thirds). for example, in the image above, the face of the fisherman is positioned 1/3 of the frame height from the top of the frame and 1/3 of the frame width from the right side.
  4. Crop the image so that any diagonal lines intersect a corner of the photo – it helps leading the viewer’s eyes into the frame. Again, in the image above, the strings lead from the bottom left corner of the frame towards the middle. Also, the diagonal planks on the hull of the boat lead from the bottom right corner.

Note: It is a good idea to keep these points in mind during the shoot itself to avoid excessive cropping in post-processing, which reduces the number of pixels (i.e. resolution) in the final photo.

Recently, I was taking headshots of the faculty members of my daughter’s dance school for their website, and looked into various ways of cropping the portraits. One rule of thumb for cropping a headshot is that cutting off the top of the model’s head makes the portrait more appealing. It may seem counter-intuitive, but this kind of close crop emphasizes the person’s eyes and make her/him appear engaged with the viewer.

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At the restaurant: dealing with low-light conditions

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Restaurant is a common setting for a group portrait, because dining out often commemorates a special occasion, as in the photo above – last Saturday we went out to celebrate my wife’s birthday. Using flash is not a good idea for several obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. In addition to disturbing other customers, a flash would completely change the character of the lighting, so capturing the ambiance would be out of the question.

Restaurants are typically dimly lit, so low light performance of the camera is very important. This characteristic cannot be narrowed down to one particular specification. It depends on the lens, the sensor and the firmware. Cell phone cameras cannot compete with DSLRs in this regard, so if you must use a cell phone, the first thing to adjust is your expectations.

If you choose to bring a DSLR, a fast lens (f2.8 or lower) is a must. Also, the lens-camera combination should ideally be relatively compact. In the Canon world, a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM is an excellent lens for this situation. Sigma also makes a good quality 35mm f1.4 lens (Sigma 340101 35mm F1.4 DG HSM), which is quite a bit less expensive. (By the way, these are just recommendations based on my experience, and although the links are affiliated by Amazon, they are not sponsored in any other way). In fact, compactness would be a very good reason to choose a cell phone over a pro camera – after all, it is a dinner first and a photo opportunity second. Having said this, I shot this photo with a Canon EOS-1D X, which is anything but compact. My family is probably getting used to me lugging a huge camera. I’d like to think that the photos are worth it. (Still, I am waiting impatiently for my new iPhone 6 plus, with its image-stabilized camera…)

Here is a roundup of the best cameras for low-light conditions compiled by Adorama (as of Summer 2014). A colleague has recently used their top choice, the Sony Alpha a7S, to photograph a fluorescent helium jet seeded with acetone in near darkness in our lab at UVic. But that hardly qualifies as a common photography situation, so it’s a subject for another story.

As a more general resource for handling low-light situations, check out this book: Chasing the Light: Improving Your Photography with Available Light.