First post: 15's Club Volleyball

mattdan12

My first post here on DGrin. I'm not a sports photographer by any means but have slowly been trying to get better. I took photos of my daughters club team last year, but those were mostly "portrait" type shots while on the court than any real action.

With her (#14) playing in high school this year, I've tried to get a little more serious about shooting the game, and now with Club starting up again, I've got more games to practice with. I'm starting to realize that my VB galleries in SM are kind of embarrassing and I need to go back through and clean out all the crap (plus reprocess some of them).

Anyway, here are a few shots from her first local tournament this past Sunday (came in 3rd). I'm one of these odd-balls that is trying to shoot sports with an Olympus camera.

Shot with an Olympus E30 and a rented 35-100mm f2.0. in JPG, manual settings. Usually would autofocus on a set point, then use the focus lock on the lens to keep that focus. Not sure why I went that route for focusing, towards the end of the HS season I was always in manual focus.

White balance was with a cheap Expodisc knock-off. Minor post processing in Aperture, run through Noise Ninja and then resized for the web with slight sharpening.

Overall my hit rate was pretty low - seemed like I had an above average number of shots that were front-focused. I have some good photos of the other team blocking our hitters... I still need to work on my timing and framing so I get more faces and the ball in the shot and I wish I could get higher shutter speeds with this camera (most of these are 1/400 or 1/500).

C&C welcome.

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P.S. I just purchased a used D300 & a couple of kit lenses off eBay yesterday. So we'll see how I like that - if I do, I'll probably try and get the 70-200mm lens when the funds are available.

tjl1388

Rent a 70-200 2.8 VR and throw it on our D300.

It'll rock your world. Your stuff is better than average without it.

Good stuff.

johng

In general, volleyball is tough to shoot so having a low keeper rate is understandable. Pre-focusing like you were doing is extremely difficult to get good shots at shallow DOF - it will work for loosely framed shots like #2 but not so much for tighter shots. When you start using the D300 you'll want to get back to using focus tracking and locking on a player. It will take some practice but you'll start getting much better results than MF or pre-focus.

As to these shots:

Overall: exposures look good on these. But I'm not a fan of the colors - looks like you bumped up the saturation - uniforms are over-saturated and skin tones are too red
1) timing on the shot is good but the subject in focus is the back of a head - that's not usually compelling. If you're shooting the setter you want her face in focus. This exact shot framing would also be more compelling if the focus were on the girl in the left of the frame. The important thought is - you want faces.
2) Again good timing. And the girl is in good focus. The problem with this shot is it's evidence it's warmups and not game and there is too much distracting elements - the coach, the other players practicing behind. So it's a good time to practice timing but not a keeper because of those aspects if that makes sense.

3) no faces and ball is in the net. No much of interest here

4) Probably the most compelling action shot - good timing, clean background and reasonable sharpness. The biggest issue is too much dead space in the frame.

5) Timing is pretty good but the angle is poor - again you want faces so you don't want to shoot your blockers from behind.

6) focus isn't great, can't really see the faces well and it's unclear whether they block the shot. Truth is blocking is one of the toughest things to get a compelling shot of - it really is. What can help is having a lens long enough that you can shoot from catwalk or stands. Even if your focus is on, oftentimes the shot isn't compelling because they don't make a clean block or the faces aren't viewable.

Again, I think you're doing some things well but you need to get those faces in the frame.

mattdan12

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it - and agree on most points. I probably should have cropped in tighter on a couple of those. On the colors of the photos, these are the colors from the camera - only color correction was the occasional minor exposure correction, but I didn't touch the saturation or white balance in post. But I might have had the saturation boosted in-camera. I guess it's those "Olympus" colors I keep hearing about....

The Olympus camera couldn't track-focus worth a damn, which is why I would either manually focus, or pre-focus. I've been using Olympus digital cameras in one form or another for over 10 years and have always been satisfied. I've considered staying with Olympus and get the E-5 and SHG lenses (which is why I rented the 35-100 f2), but I still don't think their autofocus performance is on par with the competition. With the D300 one thing I'm hoping for is better track focusing/auto focus performance.

#2 I'm pretty sure is a in-game shot. There were four other courts behind here that were being played on as well. The coach on the left of the frame is actually one of the refs (other teams coaches & team members act as the refs and score keepers).

bbjones

Wow, good stuff! I've never thought about it, but getting shots of faces without nets in the way has to be really tricky.

It won't surprise me if there is volleyball in my daughter's future -- for now, it's all in the gymnastics gym. Keep posting, it's great stuff!

patrnel

I agree with tjl1388 - a 70-200 2.8 will change your life...