I had the pleaseure of working with the players from the 2010 ANZ Netball Championships last Friday. I had been contracted to take the media shots of each player during their other media committments on the day. The players are some of the nicest, and lets admit, tallest, ladies I have ever worked with. Great at following direction and happy to have a little fun when I lost my mind at the end of the day and asked them to stick their tongues out!!

The setup was nice and simple with 2 front lights and one rear 3/4 rim light. All shot on white seamless paper. The lights were the Elinchrom Ranger Quadras connected to the mains. They ran all day faultlessly. I shot tethered to my laptop so the players and I could see what was going on.

I shot a quick video on the 5D to show the room layout, and to see a couple of the more fun photos from the day.

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Much thanks to Michael Bradley from MBPhotowho was a kind boss on the day, Looked after me, bought me sushi and coke and kept me in line.

Using iMatch you are able to get EXIF analysis on how you shot over a period of time. I have analysed 2009 to see what trends are developing.

FOCAL LENGTH

While this is not broken down into great detail, it does show that I spend most of my time at the longer end of the focal length area. This is common in sports photographers and longer lenses get you closer to the action.

APERTURE

This was a little surprising to me, I try to shoot really shallow, so to have f5.6 as the clear winner is interesting. I think the marathon and triathlon images (and their volume) are appearing here. I must admit, that after f2.8, f5.6 has always been my favourite aperture.

SHUTTER SPEED

I would have thought I shot faster on average. Again I think this is the marathon and triathlon events that are mostly shot at Tv=500 for me. All the bigger stadium sports I try to shoot at 800 – 1000. At a guess I’d say all the 250th stuff is from flash work.

ISO

Lots of high ISO used here. Some justification in investing is some good ISO noise removing software. Plenty of ISO3200 which is interesting. On the MK3 this was ok, but on the older cameras it was not too crash hot. MK4 is great so I expect this to go up on average for 2010.

CAMERA USAGE

WOW, that’s a lot of shots. Keeping in mind that this is only the images I have on file, not the ones I deleted on camera. “Sport” cameras work more than the “Commercial” cameras. I’d like to change this in 2010, with more commercial shoots.

LENS USAGE

This one is very interesting. It’s a good demo of what you have sitting in the cupboard and never use. I have a few very expensive lenses that did not get used at all last year. No surprise the 70-200 and 400 f2.8 are at the top of the list. These are the standard lenses for a sports photographer.

It’s good to look back on 2009 and see what I’ve used and how I’ve used it. I would like to move more into commercial and advertising, but finding the time to develop that side of my business is hard.

As with any new camera, I try to calibrate the lenses I use to make sure they are doing what the camera thinks. With shorter lenses I use the Lens Align Pro which works extremely well.

This product does not work so well from say 200mm and longer. The resolution of the camera and the minimum focal distance make it inoperable. So I decided to make my own long lens calibrations system.

Using the new Mark IV, I first wanted to test the 400 and 1.4 I would be using at the cricket next week. As with the MK III I needed to back the focus back quite a bit to get the FOD sharp. At 10 meters, f4, 560mm (400 X 1.4) the DOF is 0.060229 m (9.969976 m to 10.030205 m), so 6 centimetres. The width of the test cards is 6 centimetres. The sharpest image was with +15 far on the camera.

From here I changes to the 400mm by itself. The DOF for this is even shorter with 4 centimetres to play with. I needed to back this off to the maximum +20 FAR on the camera to get it close.

I might talk to Canon to see if they can factory calibrate the lens a bit better. Sure it’s old, but the may be able to tweak it closer for me.

For the first time in years, I wanted to get some fireworks pictures. The fact that last night was a full moon also was irresistible.

I spent a few days before checking the tides, the moon locations, googling how to take fireworks pictures, setting up the cameras etc….. I wanted to be prepared.
I left home at 11pm to walk to the park adjacent to the Newport Arms. I’d scoped these locations a week or so before and knew that this would not be too crowded and would have a good view of the fireworks. A few test shots, a few adjustments and I was ready to go…..just needed to wait for midnight.

I had two approaches, one camera was a longer exposure to get the effect of the full moon lighting the scene and the other camera was to get the firework bursts only. Here are the test shots.

The clock turned 12 welcoming in 2010. Then the fireworks started……over there!!! I had assumed that the fireworks would go off on a barge in front of the Arms. Instead they were going off out of frame off to my left. Quickly moving the tripods to face in the rough direction, I had no time to check anything, so just started the timers going.

The long exposure worked ok, but as it was 60 seconds, the bursts get a little lost in the smoke and the over exposure.

Set-up : 5D MK2, 16-36 @ 16mm, f8, ISO 640 exposure 60 seconds – Release TC-80N3.

The shorter exposure worked ok too in the end, but I was too far from the fireworks to get anything really sharp.

Set-up : 1D MK IV, 15mm Fisheye, f8, ISO 100, 8 Seconds – Release TC-80N3.

All in all, the result was ok, but ti does pay to be prepared. Know your location and never assume anything.
There’s always next year…..

I’ve had some time to myself with the recent birth of Ryan, so to pass the time I’ve been playing with some ideas that have been bouncing in my head. This one is to test the usable range of the WFT-E2 unit I have for the MK3. I wantes to see if it could be used for live transmission of a remote camera at the other end of a cricket field. According to the SCG web site, the goal-line to goal-line distance is 151 meters. I’ll need to comefortably stretch this distance to make this work reliably.

For my test I had the MK3 with 24-70 lens attached, set in FTP mode with auto send. This means that when ever I take a photo, it would autimatically be sent to the FTP server. I had my laptop in the car running Cerberus FTP server, and connected to a netgear wireless router running off a 12V battery. To extend the range of the router, I have an 8db Omni antenna stuck on the roof on my car. To measure the distance, I have a measuring wheel and the GPS attached to the camera to Geotag every photo (link to KMZ below).

Starting at the car, I took a photo every 10 meters and made sure it sent ok. All was well, untill 80 meters, where the first transfer failed. I manually sent the image again and it steamed through at 36Mbps. At 100 meters everything worked a charm also. I tested every 10M until 160 meters, then went to the end of the field for shits and giggles.

At the end of my test field I got to 203 meters and all was working ok.

Results : Generally everything worked ok in the test and I am happy with the range. I was testing on RAW files that were 13.6Meg, so at times when the transfer speed got to 1Mbps it was very slow. In theory this will work ok. The SCG is a very RF noist environment so it may struggle.

I have ordered a 14dB Directional antenna which should fix the reception up a bit. The WFT is the weakest link with it’s transmitter not being amazingle strong.

The only remaining problem, is that images that do not send, are not automatically retransmitted. I will need further tests to see if this is a real limitation. All images are stored on the cards so there is always later…..

Test info in the attached Google Earth KMZ file (1 Meg)…..HERE