High School Volleyball--C & C

[Zivnuska]

Almost everything is ISO 3200, f/2.8 1/1000 sec, Manual, RAW, Ring Of Fire. The brightest lights in the house were from the ads on the scoreboards which wreaked havoc with exposure and white balance as the ads (and the ambient light) changed from blue to red to white to black to yellow.



1. Bicentennial Center Salina, Kansas. The site of the Kansas 3A and 4A State Volleyball Championships.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q225/zivnuska/_ZIV6035-Edit.jpg


2.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q225/zivnuska/_ZIV6148-Edit.jpg


3.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q225/zivnuska/_ZIV6444-Edit.jpg


4.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q225/zivnuska/_ZIV6495-Edit.jpg


5.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q225/zivnuska/_ZIV6830-Edit.jpg


6. This is the daughter of the coach. His wife (her Mom) passed away 3 weeks ago after a long battle with liver cancer. That made this season very challenging and although we did not win the state championship, they did a great job in getting to the tournament.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q225/zivnuska/_ZIV6863-Edit.jpg


7.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q225/zivnuska/_ZIV7045-Edit.jpg


8.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q225/zivnuska/_ZIV7152-Edit-1.jpg

C & C appreciated.

[Dan-o]

Damn very nice Phil, giving Kevin a run for VB king. :lol: Have you used ROF before? I never have.

[Magic 24]

I concur...really nice! Would #5 be considered a "double hit"?:D

[ty wonon]

Nothing to pick apart.......those are simply great!

[slikscott]

Great Shots!!!

[RCB]

Really enjoyed these shots! Took a look at your entire series and you had a lot of shots that you could have posted here. Great job.

[Zivnuska]

Damn very nice Phil, giving Kevin a run for VB king. :lol: Have you used ROF before? I never have.


Dan-o

Thanks for the compliment. I try to learn from the VB King as much as I can because he is terrific at this game and his description of how to shoot volleyball is very helpful. Shot #6 was stolen from Bill (liam5100). [His was better!]

I've owned the 1D Mark III for two years. Initially, when I tried the ROF, it wasn't very useful in my hands. That may have been operator error. I gave up on it. Since the last hardware and software update, I tried it again and my experience is the ROF is terrific for sports like track where there is usually good separation from other competitors. With other sports, center point focus is the rule. My 300mm shots at the tournament were made at first with the center focus point but then I changed to ROF and the tracking was terrific. Once acquired, the target stayed focused with no interference from the netting or the tape on the top and bottom of the net. It was surprisingly easy to stay focused on spikers when the 300 f/2.8 was mated to the 1D III in ROF mode. Part of the credit goes to the lens. My 70-200 didn't focus as fast or as accurately--I changed to the 135 f/2.0 for the mid length shots.

It seems to me that the 1D III handles very differently depending on how the customizing parameters are set up. I'm still learning the when, where, why and how for best camera configuration.

Z

[tigermom79]

Awesome pictures!!!!!! I've been shooting vb for six years now and thought I was doing well....I've got a lot of work to do!!!!!

[beacherz]

Trememdous shots. What was your position for #4? I only wish my 70-200 would stay on trac with focus using al-servo through the net. Thanks for sharing.

[focus.pocus]

very nicely done...

[beacherz]

Phil - just read the caption next to #6. A sad story we are hearing way too often these days. Say, did you do any pp on these? My shots at 3200, 2.8 look terrible in comparison. Thanks again.

[Big K]

Holy Cow Phil, those turned out great!! I somehow missed this thread until just now. Given these compounded with your strobed work, I pass the crown to you. :-)

Sorry to hear the team did not win but it sounds like they had a great season.

My local team is also done for the year so now it is on to basketball and back to a sport where I can use strobes. Yeah!!

Keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing more of it soon.

[perfeng702]

excellent work

[MT Stringer]

Those look great Phil. But I guess I don't understand what ROF means. If I don't have my MK III set up that way, it may be something I should check out.
Thanks
Mike

[Tee Why]

Some nice shots.
NO. 5 is a funny moment.

[Dinomite]

All great shots... I like #8... Did she end up with the smash, it looks like her timing was a little off? I hope she smashed it...

[Zivnuska]

Trememdous shots. What was your position for #4? I only wish my 70-200 would stay on trac with focus using al-servo through the net. Thanks for sharing.


The shooting position for #'s 3, 4, and 7 are the same. Look at picture #1 and imagine being on the left side, in the stands, just over halfway up to the rafters looking down toward the court. That position really helps with the big problem of trying to shoot faces of spikers or blockers and not getting the top tape of the net in front of those faces. I used the 300mm f/2.8 and if I had owned one, a 400mm from even higher would have been great also. As soon as I saw the steep pitch of the stands I knew I wanted to try to shoot from up there.

BTW, check out Image #1 for the light cycling!


Phil - just read the caption next to #6. A sad story we are hearing way too often these days. Say, did you do any pp on these? My shots at 3200, 2.8 look terrible in comparison. Thanks again.


The 1D Mark III has a 1 to 1 1/2 stop advantage in noise at high ISOs over the 20D or 40D. That helps. Noiseware pro is very good.

PP--The combination scoreboard/billboard was really bright and changed with each advertisement. Therefore, I took the RAW images, tweaked the exposure 0.0 to +0.4 stops, adjusted the white balance to between 3950 and 4400 degrees Kelvin (from the ads and light cycling), fined tuned the tint for skin tones, cropped to a popular print aspect ratio (4 x 5, 4 x 6, 5 x 7, 1 x 1), batch boosted clarity--all in Lightroom II; ran the images through noiseware pro (slightly less than default settings) and sharpened in Photoshop. Then I posted them on zenfolio for parents.

Don't want to scare you but 400 images x 1 minute/image = over 6 hours. It took me longer.



Kevin,

Thanks for the kind words, but I'm more grateful to you for sharing your expertise for the rest of us to learn. You, Dennis, Bill, and other top shooters really help me (and others) a lot.

Those look great Phil. But I guess I don't understand what ROF means. If I don't have my MK III set up that way, it may be something I should check out.
Thanks
Mike


ROF refers to the so called "Ring Of Fire" available on the 1D III. Instead of choosing a single focus point, the camera has a focus mode such that when you choose it, a ring of red focus points illuminate in the view finder---the ring of fire. In this mode, initial target acquisition is made on the object in the center of the viewfinder and then all the focus points are used to track the object. Check the manual. As I said, at first that mode didn't work well for me but since I sent the camera to Canon for the last hardware and software update, the ROF mode seems to work well (for me) when the target (person) has good separation from other people. It's great for track or football runners/receivers in the open field but not so good in crowded situations where I use the center focus point.


Some nice shots.
NO. 5 is a funny moment.

It was funny and I never realized it until I looked at the pics in the computer. Even better, I've got a 4 frame burst of the whole thing from when the players first started to react.

All great shots... I like #8... Did she end up with the smash, it looks like her timing was a little off? I hope she smashed it...

She did indeed smash it. At that moment, she was still on her way up. She smashed to ball off the blockers hands out of bounds for the point.

I was really pleased that of these 8 images, two were wide angle, three were long telephoto, and three were in the middle (135mm). A batch that includes different perspectives seems to me to be more pleasing to view.

Thanks guys and ladies.

[disneydork06]

very nice work here. sorry to hear they didn't win the final match.

[Ethan Erickson]

Fantastic photos! Nuff said :)

[Lonnie]

These are really nice. I especially like #8 - the height of her jump and the anticipation of all the girls on the court make it a really nice shot.

[Palladium]

Really Fantastic Images

Imagine if the new Mark IV has 2 stops better performance than the Mark III -

[cppalermo]

These are great shots! Thx

[bulayog]

These are awesome shots!

[WaFp]

#8 is my fav. the entire set is very well shot, gotta love that 1DMkIII :-D