Photographing night football games

I'm adding this post to note a personal milestone overlooked in yesterday's post, the one featuring photographs from the Indiana Warriors NAFL semipro football game Saturday at Manual High School.

Until this past Saturday, I had not shot photos of a night football game since my first year out of college, when, as editor of the Columbus (Wis.) Journal-Republican weekly newspaper, I covered the Columbus Cardinals high school football team and used a 35mm film camera (shooting in black-and-white) and a Nikkormat zoom lens.

I would not have even remembered the detail about the camera if not for Paul Gero, who I met during my year in Columbus and who I mentioned here in a post last week. When he and I reconnected two years ago, he reminded me of the photographic gear that the Columbus newspaper used back then, something I had long forgotten. Gero, however, having spent his entire career in professional photography (mostly newspapers) and who now runs a wedding photography business in southern California, remembers it well.

My 30+ years of rust showed after I reviewed my images on the computer Saturday night at home after the game, but I nevertheless felt encouraged: I came closer to what I was hoping for than I expected.

At the game, I used my Canon 30D and Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens. I shot most of the game at the long end of the focal range (200mm), ISO 3200 and using the shutter priority mode (set at 1/250). I think it would have been wiser if I had gone at least another shutter increment or two faster, which would have pushed my f/stop to nearly wide open, as most of my images at 1/250 came out with the f/stop at 4.0 or one stop wider.

While most of my images were sharp at 1/250, so many of the better captures also had some blur (from subject movement, not camera shake) in areas I would have liked to have seen frozen, something I think a faster shutter could have gotten me. Still, the lighting at Manual High School's field was what I had expected -- not nearly as good as I had hoped and not what most photographers would prefer. And I kept the shutter at 1/250 because I feared that going faster and pushing the aperture to its maximum would cost me sharpness in the depth of field window. In retrospect, because of the distance I was from the subjects/targets, that probably should not have been as significant of a factor.

Because of the extremely high ISO (and 3200 is the highest my 30D will go), I did have to apply a noise-removal filter to all of my images in post-processing, and I was fully expecting to do that. It's the trade-off for needing to use those settings on the camera for night action. Fortunately, the software did help in that respect. When I reviewed the pictures after the Noiseware application, the serious noise was barely detectable.

Every picture tells a story: Finding unexpected value

Backlighted photos you don't have the time to set up properly might end up in the discard pile a lot. But with some work and care in post-processing, sometimes you can come up with wonderful silhouettes or beautiful portraits with such images. This is a story about one such photo; the image might not be very spectacular, but it is one I'm glad I didn't toss.

I strive to shoot available light when possible, even for indoor family gatherings. I did so on Thanksgiving, and although the end result from those pictures was satisfying, I didn't arrive at the "end result" until after a lot of post-processing work with editing software. Even using an ISO of 1600 and a lens with a wide aperture (f/1.8), I still had difficulty getting enough light for optimum exposure in the living room, dining room and the grandchildren's playroom on Thanksgiving. With 150+ pictures, it entailed considerable work.

I wanted to avoid so much post-processing editing for the Christmas get-together. So on Thursday, I decided to use Gary Fong's "Puffer" light diffuser on the pop-up flash on my Canon 30D. I knew I'd miss that natural look in ambient-light photos, but the Puffer delivered decent exposures, didn't white-out people's faces from using a straight-on pop-up flash, and left me far less work afterward. Oh, it also helped that I shot about 50 fewer pictures than on Thanksgiving!

One image I did spend a lot of time on afterward was a shot of my 3-year-old grandson Jakob, who I had noticed positioned in front of bright sunshine, streaming in from a dining room window, as he examined one of his Christmas presents. I knew I wouldn't have the time to set up a candid the way I really wanted, or to shoot many frames before Jakob would move on to other things. So I simply pushed down the pop-up and fired off an available-light frame in hopes I'd have something usable.

The color picture above is the original, unedited shot. I didn't feel strongly about it, but I did notice interesting spot illumination on Jakob's cheek, nose and forehead that I thought would be worth emphasizing in a grayscale (black-and-white) conversion. So in post-processing, I made a copy of the jpeg, converted it to grayscale, cropped it to eliminate the tiny stray light on the bottom left, fiddled with the facial shadows and highlights to play up the spot facial illumination, and tweaked the contrast. I left in the two tiny lights in the right background of the image to retain some balance and a representation of the holiday. The lights were on a garland decorating a living room wall. The result of the edit is the black-and-white version you see above left.

Then I made a copy of that b/w image and recropped it as a tight horizontal in pursuit of a dramatic, moody feel (below). On the crop, only the bottom of the two background garland lights showed up, and at this tight of a crop, that tiny light became more prominent and, hence, a distraction. So I cloned (erased) it out. The tradeoff going from the vertical to horizontal crop was a considerable loss of size -- my guess is that this version will lose quality printed at anything larger than 5x7 -- but I do like the effect, and all in all, the two-grayscale copies gave me value out of an image I might otherwise have discarded.

Gary Fong, by the why, markets a variety of flash diffusers; most are for electronic flash units; the Puffer I mentioned above is for pop-ups and is among the least expensive. You can check out his full line at http://store.garyfonginc.com/ ... and no, I don't know Gary! I'm simply providing this in case anyone would like to explore it further.