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. 

As for a lens to use at the shoot ... 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 70-200mm Canon glass, but because 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 Saturday’s shoot.

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 of 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; I’m planning to do a separate post on the church campus. 

It doesn’t appear that Lizzy’s league keeps official score of their games (it appears 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 that 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 re-acclimate 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 (in captions) 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 re-acclimating 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 a 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.

Roy G. Holland Park is circular, spacious ... and key resource in Fishers, Ind.

In the mid- to late 1980s, my early years living in Indianapolis, a teammate on a company softball league we played for would often invite my family over to his home after games to dine and relax while the kids amused themselves on the swings and other playground-type equipment.

George, the work colleague and teammate, lived in the town of Fishers on the northeast side of Indianapolis. Their home was in one of the town's earliest major developments. One summer in the 1980s, he and his wife invited my family to Fishers to enjoy the town's annual Freedom Festival and parade held in celebration of the Fourth of July.

Remember, this goes back almost 30 years, a time when Fishers was just beginning to blossom into a community. It was nowhere near the size and development it is today. One thing has stayed constant through the years, though: The Freedom Festival -- an amalgam of food and beverage vendors, games for all ages and music -- was then and is still anchored at Roy G. Holland Park, an amenity in the heart of Sunblest residential development.

Details of that day 30 years ago are vague today, but I do remember being struck by the circular configuration of the park. I could be wrong about this, but I don't remember the park being very developed at that time. Certainly not to the degree it is today.

This year, I made several trips to the park, the first time I've had an occasion to explore it closely. Lee Ann's daughter, Mindy, and Mindy's family live in that same development. I was there for the Freedom Festival in the summer (which I wrote about in a separate blog post), and I was there again last month while taking walks for exercise through the neighborhood during a return visit to Indiana.

While on my walks, I made a point to periodically stop and pull out my iPhone to make photographs of the park, thinking the images might make a good subject for a future post here. So that's what this is about. The photos were taken on separate visits, Oct. 18-19, of this year. A full gallery can be found at my site at Smugmug.com.

I was particularly struck by how this park has plenty of space for soccer and baseball fields, a couple of basketball courts and even two sand volleyball courts. You can see the latter through the trees -- some of whose leaves were starting to turn colors -- in the photo leading off the post. I didn't devote any photos this time to the playground area because I think I covered that pretty well in my post this summer from the Freedom Festival.

For those of you looking for a pleasant course to tackle some day, Holland Park's paved path along the circumference is just about a mile long.

Roy G. Holland Park has ample space to accommodate soccer (above), pickup basketball (below), baseball (second below) and sand volleyball (third below). If you pull up a larger version of the photo of the volleyball courts, you can see an adult seated in the shade on the far left ... and two small children romping through the sand just right of center at the far end of the courts.

Above and below: A small section of the park's north end is heavily wooded, and strikingly so in a back-lighting situation, which is what I came upon on both visits. I paused a while to appreciate how it was in this area -- where there was good shade and cover from the hot sun -- where the vast majority of Freedom Festival food, beverage and arts and craft vendors set up just a few months earlier. 

A paved path (above) that is part of the circumference trail, and another (below) that winds through the park's interior. 

Above: Another autumn colors photo.

Above: A drainage pipe I found of interest.

Above: Walking back in the neighborhood after leaving the par, I came across this low-hanging branch on a tree whose leaves were changing colors ... and highlighted in dappled sunlight.