Diving photos - Comments encouraged...

zonaphotos · January 3, 2009

Here are some photos I took at a diving meet yesterday. Please comment for improvement...

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

torags · January 3, 2009

You got the sharpness needed, perhaps opening the aperture more, there's a lot "junk" in the background that takes away from the diver.

4 & 5 are the best (to me) and the shadow is interesting (don't know what you can do with it tho') The first three have light issues, wrong side on one, not enough on two others.

You might consider picking your shooting spot before the action, where the light is good and relatively clean background and just stay there and move with the light. I mean they are all coming to the board, right?

just my .02

jonh68 · January 3, 2009

4 and 5 are the only ones IMHO that the background is OK as well having a long shot. The shadows on the wall mirroring the diver is a nice shot. However, the other shots have too much distracting background and they framing is not tight on the diver.

Get where the background is not as bad or open the aperture up more to blur the backgrounds. Also, don't be afraid to really zoom in close, even at the expense of getting the full body in the picture. A nice facial expression while performing would be a great shot. It's OK to crop off body parts if shooting tight, as long as the crop points are not at joints or cut off hands, fingers etc. It's best to cut off at the middle of an arm than say at the wrist.

johng · January 3, 2009

Need tighter framing. IMO, every shot should be framed like the first one. It will be scary trying to frame so tightly, but with practice you'll get there. There really is little need for "context" in a diving shot to me - it's not about the height really it's about the form of the diver and the detail of the shot.

And, I will make a distinction - I say FRAMED tighter, not cropped tighter. You lose way too much detail when cropping from shots framed too loosely. I would suggest you want your subject filling at least 1/2 the frame in-camera. If you can have the subject filling 3/4 of the frame so much the better.

OldGuy · January 3, 2009

johng wrote:

Need tighter framing. IMO, every shot should be framed like the first one. It will be scary trying to frame so tightly, but with practice you'll get there. There really is little need for "context" in a diving shot to me - it's not about the height really it's about the form of the diver and the detail of the shot.

And, I will make a distinction - I say FRAMED tighter, not cropped tighter. You lose way too much detail when cropping from shots framed too loosely. I would suggest you want your subject filling at least 1/2 the frame in-camera. If you can have the subject filling 3/4 of the frame so much the better.

I agree with Johng completely about framing... I am a High School diving coach and I shoot my crew during practice by burst firing and panning to give them visual feed-back on their technique. On your next outing, I would suggest getting the divers during practice before the competition if you haven't already. They will be doing their dives over and over again and this will help you get the timing of each dive which will help you capture different phases of the dives and therefore more interesting angles.

Keep shooting!

Regards,
John