From the 5th to the 10th of April, I had the pleasure of working with Duane Hart from Sporting Images at the 2010 Australian Age Swimming Championships. The event brings some of Australia’s best 18 and under swimmers together to claim the national title.
In previous years, we had overhead remotes and remotes in the pool edge port holes, but this year for the first time, we used underwater remote cameras.
The cameras were Canon 1D MK3, MK4 and 5D MK2 (depending on the day and the setup). The underwater housings are Aquatech and the lens ports used are for the 16-35 and the 15mm fish eye. To trigger the cameras we had one 100′ and 2×20′ Aquatech trigger cables. Duane operated the cameras from the pool deck, triggering the camera to capture the peak of the action.
To position the camera I used my recently acquired SCUBA skills to swim the cameras into place and to set them up. See the video below on how this was done.
The final results are really great. After some initial teathing problems we got the locations and setting perfect for the last 4 nights. Much thanks to Duane for letting me chase this image. There aren’t many companies that are as progressive and challenging as Sporting Images and I congratulate Duane for giving this a go. Cheers to Matt Roberts for his assistance and high contrast focus-specific boardshorts. Cheers to Delly Carr for encouraging me to keep going when the first night was rubbish….and for giving me heaps along the way 
. Thanks to Dan and the team at the Sydney Olympic Aquatic centre for letting me in the pool, and finally thanks to John from Swimming Australia for giving the final ok.
Images can be seen at www.sportingimages.com.au
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April 13th, 2010 , admin
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This is something I’ve been working on for a few months now, and it’s finally working. My aim was to have a camera underwater and to be able to trigger it with the PocketWizards and to be able to retrieve the data instantaneously.
SETUP :
Aquatech DV4-III, FishEye port
Canon 1D MK3 and Fish Eye
Some homemade cables
Pocketwizard
Laptop
The data transfer is by far the hardest part of this build. The transfer rates are not too fast with L-JPG taking 8 seconds each and RAW files taking 15 seconds each, but if you are just shooting bursts (Start and finishes) then this is fine.
The first real test will be the National Age Group Swimming with Sporting Images in a few weeks. I have to get the approval of the pool manager and then hope the coaches don’t get too upset by it and we’re a go’er.
Fingers Crossed.
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.
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.
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March 11th, 2010 , admin
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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.
