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Monday, December 19, 2011
2011 Holiday Xmas card pics
I've photographed many things including sports, wildlife, macro, weddings, and babies. However, the toughest thing by far for me to shoot has always been our annual Holiday Xmas card photos. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to get our kids to sit still, look at the camera and smile. Just getting them into their holiday clothes, I was already ready to pull my hair out. However I must say that the kids were troopers. I took the family out to Upper Newport Backbay to shoot right before sunset. It was chilly in the low 50s and the wind was blowing fierce. Poor Noah had a runny nose the whole time. I enlisted the help of my brother and his girlfriend, Yen to help shoot the family portrait shot. I did notice that as the kids are getting older, they are getting more cooperative with the photo shoot. Anyways, happy holidays everyone!
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OCO Madness
Megan plays in a youth basketball league called Orange County Optimists (OCO). Many of the parents (including my wife Sandy) actually played in this league back when they were a little kids too. Megan's division is called Tinkos which is for the 5 year old kids. Watching these little rug rats run around the basketball court is ridiculously cute.
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On a technical side, shooting action sports in this gym is very challenging. The light quality is very poor. You are going to have to use a lens with the largest aperture possible. I had great success using a canon 85mm f1.8 lens. It is a fast low light lens with a good working distance. The ultrasonic motor definitely helped when it came to focusing on my targets as fast as possible. You might be able to get away using a f2.8 lens but you will have to crank the ISO way up to get enough light to freeze the shots. I was going for a shutter speed of at least 1/250th second.
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The other challenge is white balance. The artificial lights in the gym cast a very strong yellow color tone which looks awful. There are different ways to work around this. The best would be to shoot in RAW and white balance in post processing. I couldn't do this because for some reason, Adobe Photoshop CS2 does not support RAW files from the Canon 7D. You can also try to manually white balance while in jpg before shooting by using a grey card or a white piece of paper. I tried doing this but the results were still quite off. Their uniforms are light blue but with the lighting in the gym, they all came out purple in color. Ah, well at least they didn't have yellow skin tones.
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The last bit of advice is to get down low when shooting. These kids are short and you want to get down to their level to shoot them. I often will sit down right at court side when shooting them. There are even a few shots where I placed my camera down on the ground and took the shots. It helps to give a cleaner foreground like the shot below. Ok enough with the technical stuff, let's see some basketball action!
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1)
On a technical side, shooting action sports in this gym is very challenging. The light quality is very poor. You are going to have to use a lens with the largest aperture possible. I had great success using a canon 85mm f1.8 lens. It is a fast low light lens with a good working distance. The ultrasonic motor definitely helped when it came to focusing on my targets as fast as possible. You might be able to get away using a f2.8 lens but you will have to crank the ISO way up to get enough light to freeze the shots. I was going for a shutter speed of at least 1/250th second.
2)
The other challenge is white balance. The artificial lights in the gym cast a very strong yellow color tone which looks awful. There are different ways to work around this. The best would be to shoot in RAW and white balance in post processing. I couldn't do this because for some reason, Adobe Photoshop CS2 does not support RAW files from the Canon 7D. You can also try to manually white balance while in jpg before shooting by using a grey card or a white piece of paper. I tried doing this but the results were still quite off. Their uniforms are light blue but with the lighting in the gym, they all came out purple in color. Ah, well at least they didn't have yellow skin tones.
3)
The last bit of advice is to get down low when shooting. These kids are short and you want to get down to their level to shoot them. I often will sit down right at court side when shooting them. There are even a few shots where I placed my camera down on the ground and took the shots. It helps to give a cleaner foreground like the shot below. Ok enough with the technical stuff, let's see some basketball action!
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