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Need Critique Please (American Football)
ehpdesigns
Registered Users Posts: 12 Big grins
Rapid City, SD has started up a new APFL2 team this summer. Their second home game is tomorrow night (07/07) and I was hoping to get some critiques on what we can do to improve the shots taken at their first game: http://smu.gs/OdJDr0
My assistant (15yr old son) was using our Nikon D3000 with a 70-300mm lens (f/4-6 I believe) and I was using our Nikon D90 with a Tamron 28-300mm lens (f/3.5-6.3).
Tried various camera settings with regard to exposure, color correction, etc on the D90. Any suggestions on how to better frame the shot, settings for the camera, etc would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you DGrinners!!
My assistant (15yr old son) was using our Nikon D3000 with a 70-300mm lens (f/4-6 I believe) and I was using our Nikon D90 with a Tamron 28-300mm lens (f/3.5-6.3).
Tried various camera settings with regard to exposure, color correction, etc on the D90. Any suggestions on how to better frame the shot, settings for the camera, etc would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you DGrinners!!
0
Comments
Couple of things:
1) PLEASE make sure you have insurance, especially if your 15 year old son is out there helping. A lot of things can happen in football and getting smacked by one of the players at full force is one of them.
2) Your horizons are all over the place. Make sure they are level.
3) Get down low. On your knees or even laying on the ground. The perspective (angle) is much better.
4) Looks like a lot of bad backgrounds, keep an eye out for that.
5) You may want to rent a lens, shooting at 5.6 may not cut it, especially if it's at night.
6) A lot of your images are soft (not sure if it's from a slow shutter speed or from your lens).
7) Don't post every single shot. You don't need to have 20 shots of players standing around.
1. If you want constructive advice from experienced sports photogs - post photos don't link to a 15 page gallery. You should be able to select 5-8 photos representative of a shoot and post them
Given #1 above, I'll provide feedback on the single image you posted in the thread:
1) post a larger image - imbed the "Large" link from your smugmug site. That is a good size for judging focus quality.
2) re-think the logo at the bottom. Right now, it's obnoxious - especially the ball graphics - looks like the canned trading cards banner with the kids name on it - which is fine for a trading card. Looks bad on a photo though.
3) Shot is underexposed - you want to be able to see faces better and they're dark here
4) framing is too loose - the only players that matter in the photo are the runner and the guy that missed the tackle. Unless there is a client requirement for landscape orientation, 80-90% of football shots can be better framed in portrait orientation. This is an example of such a shot. There is more vertical component to the subjects than horizontal. In either case there is way too much dead space.
5) as mentioned, backgrounds are a problem - not so different than HS football. The only real solution is shallower DOF. For that you're going to need better lenses than you're currently shooting with. You've got a professional version of smugmug and are selling photos - even if there is a market there, you're not going to sell many photos with those kinds of backgrounds. There's not enough quality difference vs what people are getting from their digicams.
Now, on to some advice regarding the business side of this since your site is attempting to sell these photos:
1) Don't ignore the advice about insurance. And, your homeowners won't cover because your working in a professional capacity. You need additional insurance to cover your gear but also liability.
2) If you have not already, you need to contact the team and league and make sure you are allowed to sell photos. For major league and NCAA Div I, that's not allowed. I recognize this is something different, but it doesn't mean image copyrights don't exist. You want to find out beforehand.
3) Who is your market audience? Who are you expecting to buy these photos? As you mention there were 50-100 spectators. Do you expect them to buy photos? I just can't imagine fan demand for buying photos of this level of play. I could imagine the team's marketing department - photos for website and stock photos for the occasional story in local paper. In that case, smugmug isn't the distribution channel you need to use.
4) Regardless of the answer to #3, work product needs to be a lot better BEFORE you try to sell. As the old saying goes - you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. I took a look in your gallery briefly - they're nice fan-type shots - what I would see from mom or dad taking photos of their son playing HS football. But, there's a huge gap between that and shots that sell.
bottom line: this isn't 10 years ago when most people didn't have a digicam much less a DSLR - now everyone has one. The demand for sports images is way down, and the supply is way up. So, I'm not sure what your business goal is with selling images of this team on smugmug.
Please don't misunderstand - I'm not trying to be mean here. Just real. There's a difference between wanting to shoot sports for a hobby and wanting to do it to make money. And, in my experience, you'll have a better chance making money shooting pee-wee football than a minor league indoor football league team (let's face it, most people don't care about indoor football, much less minor league indoor football team). The reason I'm saying all this is: you need better equipment to make consistently saleable images. From a business standpoint, it only makes sense to buy that equipment if there will be a return on investment. So, even if you were shooting a D4 with 400mm 2.8 VR and knew what you're doing, I'm not sure you could ever sell enough images of that team to pay for the equipment - much less time spent.
Just some food for thought.
Thank you John. Shooting this team is mainly a chance to get my hands dirty with outdoor sports. Sporting events in the western South Dakota region are minimal (as you can imagine). We have credentials to shoot the local CHL team (Rapid City Rush) but do not sell those images. Our site serves numerous purposes in general (more as a side hobby, maybe in 5-10yrs we'll have better experience and equipment but for right now it really is a side hobby).
Shooting these various events (football, hockey, group events, etc) is really just a means of "hands on practice". I have friends in the industry that shoot professionally but they live in a MUCH bigger market and its a passion I've come to enjoy over the last several years, but the opportunity to do so is minimal.
I appreciate your critique and will work more on the orientation and such (the soft touches of the pictures was an overuse of Photoshop tools that I was playing around with).
I mostly shoot pro teams, so don't have a lot of experience selling photos to the youth market. However, I did shoot a youth soccer tournament as a fundraiser for my daughter's soccer team last month, and managed to gross about $4K in online sales (I didn't print and sell on site) for two days of games. About 70% of the sales were for the 8-12 year old age group, and the rest to the 13-18 year old group.
http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1794336#post1794336
Phil
"You don't take a photograph, you make it." ~Ansel Adams
Phil
I stumbled upon that post as well. Some good advise given there as well. I'll post a couple pics next week to see if I'm able to improve upon the recommendations given (minus upgrading the hardware at the present moment).