comments and suggestions wanted - soccer

Hi All -

This is a shot from my 2nd game using the canon 40d and 70-200 2.8 w/ 1.4 tc. Unfortunately I left the lens hood home and had this shot angled more toward the sun than I would have liked. Please let me hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks - Steve

Hi Steve,
Suggestion #1: Never leave your hood off the lens! Besides keeping light out that hood is the first line of defense in protecting the front element (glass) from damage.

In this shot the hood actually wouldn't have helped a whole lot because the sun is behind the subject. To shoot in this condition #1 don't worry about blowing out the background, #2 use fill flash, get rid of the shadows.
Always keep the sun in front of your subject as much as possible, if you have to move to the other side of them.
You have a really good shot here thats "fixable", the timing is great, but the girl being in the dark is the problem. In PS you could crop out most of the scene around her and using Highlights & Shadows bring out a lot of missing detail in the shadows...ie lightening her up. Nice start, I really like the timing on it. :thumbsup:

JS

Thanks JS. I shot in raw and still have that file. Should I use the Canon DPP and try to fix in there? I have PS 4.0 so I think I have to upgrade and get raw plug ins.

Steve

You can try DPP, I rarely use RAW so I don't use DPP. I use PhotoShop Elements in fact instead of PS which for 95% of what I do is perfect, and much cheaper!

JS

I looked at my PS and it is PS Elements 4.0. Would you suggest just convert and save from raw then work with the image in PS?

You can do it either way, but it depends on what you want to do with it too. 99% of my work goes to newpapers so it's not a big deal. If your going to print say an 8x10 I'd probably at the minimum do a crop from the RAW and go from there. The nice thing is you can experiment and try it both ways and see which works best for you....the advantage of digital! Just make sure to save it with a different name so you don't overwrite the original RAW file.
Doing it both ways also helps you learn different ways of doing things.
JS

Thanks for the input, much appreciated.

Steve

Not a problem Steve :) You just got lucky that I was here at the moment, I'm just getting ready to head out the door :eek: and it's gettin colder up here :mad:

JS

Steve,

I agree with JS. You have the timing and that's one of the most important aspects of capturing good soccer photos. I take hundreds of girls soccer photos and use Photoshop Elements for all post-processing. In fact, I just downloaded the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw (sorry I'm in work so I can't tell you what version) which is free and integrates in with PS Elements. So if you shoot RAW, you may want to grab that. By the way, I used to shoot RAW sports shots but eventually switched to JPG.

Just keep practicing!!!

Rob

Soccer is tough to shoot but get the sun to your back and take a lot more photos than you might want. You can always delete. With the young ones like this you can really get close to the action. I like the young gal to the right of the principal. I've seen that kind of action at kids games before.

I want to get my wife and me a good digital camera to photograph soccer and hockey. I am a beginner and want something that will be good (don't need professional quality) and fairly easy to use.

Any suggestions (the D40 pic in this thread looks good to me).

Thanks,
Tom

One thing I like to do shooting soccer is kneeling down to shoot, that makes the jump look higher and the picture comes out with some more action/emotion.
Other than that I guess was said before.
Nice job, keep it up. :D

This shot would have been better exposed using a lower aperture. When you shoot toward the light, as JS said, don't worry about the background being blown out. Opening up the lens would have let the faces in the shadows show up more. For late afternoon soccer I generally shoot at f2.8 unless the sun is behind me.