Mixed luck in first shoot of soccer

 I came to enjoy photographing sports a long time ago. 

At my first job for a print publication, the weekly Columbus (Wis.) Journal-Republican, I photographed the local high school's football, basketball and baseball teams regularly and took occasional shots at wrestling, cross country and track and field competitions there as well. 

One sport I  had never photographed through the years was soccer, but that changed last weekend. 

I attended a youth league game in Cary, N.C., where Lee Ann's granddaughter, Lizzy, was playing. I'd been to one other game of hers and had shot some casual photos with my iPhone. But on Saturday, I decided I wanted to see how I would fare shooting while using my Canon 6D. 

And for a lens ... if I were shooting the competition to get serious end results, i.e., on assignment or for a client, I'd have used my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS and a 1.4 extender. But that lens is heavy, and I'm not sure I'd have been able to shoot the whole match comfortably with it, so I opted for the Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.8 Di PZD lens that I've been using as my walk-around lens for a couple years now. It's a lens I've come to appreciate, not just because it's much lighter than the Canon f/2.8L lenses, but it also delivers quite well most of the time.

I was mostly pleased with what I ended up getting, although it had been a while since I shot a fast-moving athletics competition (I think that a February 2017 high school basketball game at Manual High School in Indianapolis was the last such occasion for me), and I'd forgotten about how dicey Canon's AI Servo focus tracking could be. Indeed, I didn't even remember to activate AI Servo until about 15 minutes into my shooting on Saturday. 

I guess that means that when it comes to sports photography, I was rusty. Guilty. But that's OK. In recent years, I've come to terms with -- and accepted -- how advancing years can affect one's ability to do a lot things, much less just photography, as adeptly as in the past.

St. Michael the Archangel Church and School on High House Road in Cary is the location for Lizzy's league games. The church has an expansive campus, with multiple buildings for the sanctuary, offices, parish hall, school ... and I think I'm forgetting the purpose for still another building. But I'm getting a head of myself, as I'll do a separate post on the church campus. 

It doesn't appear that Lizzy's league keeps official score (it appear to be one of those kinds of leagues), and if it did keep score, there was no visible evidence for spectators to see it anywhere. And not knowing ahead of time where it was one of those leagues, I didn't dare ask anyone. But as best as I can recall, the game finished in a 3-3 tie. 

I had so-so luck getting quality kick shots like the one you see leading off the post, and I'm going to include a couple here that were not of optimum quality, mostly as evidence of my struggle to reacclimate to AI Servo focusing. 

But I did pretty well getting good close-to-the-ball struggle shots, which I'll warn you now will dominate the selections here. I'll stop and comment where I feel it is necessary. To view a full gallery of images I processed from the shoot, follow the link in this sentence. 

Above: I like the expression on the blond-haired boy on the left in this shot. 

Above: I wish I knew what that girl on the left was yelling in this shot. 

In post-processing, I came to appreciate the young man above and in the next two photos. He was one of the shortest kids on the field, but boy, he hustled, played hard and wasn't afraid to knock elbows with some of the taller youths on the field.  

Above and below: The shot on goal by this young man on Lizzy's team was successful. 

Above: This shot on goal was wide left. 

The photos above and below were consecutive frames on my memory card, illustrating that when you get tangled up in a struggle over the ball, both players can end up on the ground. 

The shot above is not in sharp focus (and I'm discovering that a few others are not as well -- more evidence of my frustration with reacclimating to AI Servo focus tracking), but I liked the position of the kicker in this stop action, so I include it anyway. 

Above and below: A girl on Lizzy's team who makes her way down the field, pausing to elude defenders. 

 

Above: A picture of Lizzy during her brief spell as her team's goal tender. She was kicking the ball away from her goal after a stop of action on an out of bounds play. 

Above: Another shot with several issues (such as focus and horizontal alignment), but I liked the kick action. I found myself correcting the horizontal alignment on a lot of the shots because the field is rarely on a straight plane in photos. But with this shot, I couldn't straighten the background because I'd have chopped off the foreground players' heads in doing so.

An overlook perspective of the church's soccer and baseball fields.