Ladies Football\Soccer... still praticing!

Just trying to apply lessons learned - particularly to make sure I get faces and expression in the shot. Lighting was horrible - lots of either very bright light or very heavy shadows on the shots. All shot with a Sigma 120-300 + TC combo.

These ladies play tough... they really do deserve more attention then they get. The first couple are your standard header shots. This are coming much easier now that I have gone back to single frame mode and not relying on the motordrive to save me.

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Mark - timing, crops and most faces look good to me. All you need is a bit of luck with the lighting but we all need more of that . For what it's worth, IMO #4 is a definite keeper and #5 is a cull -- these faces and the shadows detract rather than add interest. Too bad about the shadows in #6 -- without them and #22 in the background this might be your best shot of all.

need to work on you're post a little more, even though the light is harsh i think you could pull better shots out of the files. I suggest learning to play with selective color and saturations

naturally you want to expose for the best shot possible, but toning the shots can be just as important.

Blinking... thats the kind of feedback I am looking for... the last one I have written off as a lost cause. I could go through and create some elaberate masks to isolate, by frankly don't feel the shot is worth the effor. The first shot the issue I have is when I adjust, I keep having an issue with the Maryland playes face going almost grey, if I saturate for her face, the purple fring on the Duke players jersey fires up... I am sure there is an better way to deal with this... just looking for it. The middle three I am not seeing color issues on my monitor... so if they are there, let me know. Thanks for the feedback.

Nice captures. Blinking, can you show us a couple of before/after examples using selective color/saturation, please?

A good bunch of well-timed images.

With regards to exposure... white shirts and red shirts... a true nightmare under direct sunlight. In this situation I'd certainly shoot some or all of the game into the sun. Will's right to say that some work can be done on the images as they are... but you're still better off getting the exposure right in the first place. Shooting into the sun would give you much more control over the contrast in the final image.

If you still decide to shoot with the sun behind you, then try working at, say, 1/3 stop under the incident meter reading (or the reading off of the grass). This should avoid the whites blowing out, but you should still be exposing far enough to the right to have a nice 'chunky' histogram. A gentle tweak with the shadow/highlight tool (or using curves) is all that would be required afterwards to open out the shadows a touch.

Shooting into the sun, use an incident meter reading... or overexpose by 2 stops or so over the reading off the grass.

---- Gavin

gavin - I could go into long excuses about why I didn't do what you have so well preached here.... but the jest of it... and it's a wimp excuse.... from where I am shooting these there is a brick building behind me, next to that a large steel bleachers.... so that is the view from the other side and with my $h&! 20D which just loves contrast lines... I avoid having those two items in the background - and doing as you say would make me deal with that. I suck at doing that. I hate pictures of bleachers with fuzzy players in front! But it looks like this time of year I had better learn to deal with it.... next time out I will do as you recommend. Bad me... I should have known better.

I know what you mean...

it's a tough call when it comes to backgrounds. You might have been served well just using the centre point AF as that would minimise the chance of the camera making a wrong decision on your behalf. Also, the bleachers would have been in shadow and hopefully not too intrusive.

Having said all that, there's still no right or wrong way of doing it. Shooting front-lit is just fine as well. The shots I took of the Womens' match last Sunday (http://www.photography​-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=105773) were with the sun behind me because the shooting positions were restricted to behind the goal-lines. It was a case of working hard to tweak the exposure as the players moved from fully front-lit to side-lit... trying to maintain some detail in the white areas as well as controlling the red channel to some degree as well.

It ain't meant to be easy...

---- Gavin