NFL: Bears Vs Giants - Nice Catch

I tried the 'both eyes open' yesterday for the first time. To be honest I feel a bit daft for not doing it before. I found my hardest problem was when to 'switch eyes' (inside my brain) and catch the peripheral action. It worked well about twice but mostly I just felt disoriented. I also noticed that my horizons have gone back to being off-level.

I shall keep working on it.

Dennis, just wanted to pop in to say I've been looking at some of your other football photos and your work is absolutely amazing. I'm taking a lot of cues from it to try to help me approach my next game better.

Dennis, fantastic shots, as usual. Thanks for sharing your workflow and the insider's view on how things work for a sports shooter at pro games. That's a lot of high pressure work and for long hours. The pay must be very good since so many want to get into it.

Something left me puzzled...

dmwierz wrote in post #8543395
........ Both of the images above are pretty aggressive crops - the action portions of the images occupied the lower left 1/4 of the frame in the original shots......

How did you get the shot in focus if the action was in the lower left 1/4 of the frame?

For an ISO 1600 shot and cropped heavily, the shot looks great. I know the trick is to get the exposure right, but still. Noise Ninja must be much better than Neat Image, which is what I use. Neat Image couldn't clean up an ISO 1600 image that well, after an heavy crop.

As far as the trick you explained on how to get the ball in perfect position within the frame, I have noticed that for me, there is about 1/4-1/2 second delay between my eye > brain > trigger finger. If I press the shutter about 1/4-1/2 second sooner than when the ball is entering the frame, I have a better success rate capturing the ball in a perfect position within the frame. Have you experienced the same thing, or is it that I am just too slow pressing the shutter?
Thanks

Sibil wrote in post #8633642
Something left me puzzled...

How did you get the shot in focus if the action was in the lower left 1/4 of the frame?

I'd like to hear more on this too... ideally to see crop lines on the original frame.

I've always wondered if I'm missing out by ALWAYS using just the center point for focus.

But my guess is that if Dennis was tracking the center point on the Bears helmet, then that would work out to the action (as shown) being in the lower-left quadrant.

Dennis can speak better than I can about this, but I am of the understanding that, unless you capture a world famous image that gets repeat exposure in publications everywhere, sports/news photography salaries are very modest. Not ridiculously low but I highly doubt people get into sports photography ever looking to get rich.

After my Mark III AF fix, I've made it a priority to instinctively change AF points when I want a certain type of framing. I'll often use the inner left/right AF point for shooting running subjects from a side, depending on what direction they're running.

It just so happened that the play developed across the field, and the action ended up being in the lower left hand corner of the frame. IIRC, I was using the receiver's helmet for AF. Sometimes things are nicely centered, sometimes not. If you do everything right (exposure, shutter speed, AF, etc), you can usually perform a pretty aggressive crop like I did with these shots.

Thank goodness for high megapixel cameras and Noise Ninja and Genuine Fractals, though

In the situation depicted in the above shots, the action is actually happening parallel to the plane of focus. What this means is, if I can nail the focus right at the beginning of getting the play in frame, I can then just concentrate of framing the shot and not mess with the AF button (the * button). Sometimes the theory here is better than the practice. I have been known to foul up a perfectly well focused series by hitting the * button in the middle of a play, when in fact I should have just left it alone. The more you shoot, the more intuitive it is when you're shooting parallel to the plane of focus.

Very rarely I will change AF points from center (like tennis). 99% of the time, I just leave it in the middle.

As for how much money there is at this level, there isn't much. As a weekend gig, it's not bad - I make more than enough to make it worth my time, but nowhere near as much as almost any full time job pulls down.

Actually, shooting youth and HS sports pays a lot better.

When I tell people how little even a double truck in SI (what a two page spread is called) pays, they are amazed. And, a double truck in SI is just about as good as editorial sports photography gets when one is a freelancer.

As for shutter lag, this can vary from camera to camera, and involves several things, including AF speed, the time it takes for the signal to go from the button to the shutter itself, as well as how long it takes the photographer to respond to his/her brain saying "mash the shutter, dang it".

^^^
Dennis, thanks for the explanations

dmwierz wrote in post #8636181
As for how much money there is at this level, there isn't much. As a weekend gig, it's not bad - I make more than enough to make it worth my time, but nowhere near as much as almost any full time job pulls down.

Actually, shooting youth and HS sports pays a lot better.

When I tell people how little even a double truck in SI (what a two page spread is called) pays, they are amazed. And, a double truck in SI is just about as good as editorial sports photography gets when one is a freelancer.

So do you shoot on spec by just putting your pictures on the wire and hope that one/some get picked up, published, and eventually a usage payment comes in?

In that Bears game, how many shots did you take, how many did you upload, and how many will you typically expect to collect royalties from?

Typical game - I shoot around 400 images. Of these, between 50 and 100 are uploaded. In a "good" game, I'm lucky if 3 or 4 of these are what I would consider keepers. I have licensed one image so far from the Bears/Giants game so far, that I know of. I may not know which images are published sometimes until I get paid and I see the itemized list of images - sometimes I see an image of mine published - sometimes somebody else, like the photo editor or a friend, sees it and contacts me - the latter is what happened with the one image licensed from the Bears game so far: my PE from the wire saw it in the New York Post and sent me a copy of the page.

I gave up long ago trying to figure out "how many will I typically expect to collect royalties from". Some games, the shot(s) I think are going to sell do so, other games the ones I almost threw away get picked up. It all depends on which stories are being written at the time, and which players any given publication is looking to get a photo of. This is why I try to get as many "stock" shots as possible, in addition to capturing the peak action.

Of course, it also comes down to having the best shot of the player they are looking for, and having it posted soon enough after the game to find its way to the licensing publication's editor when they're assembling their story.

Regarding payment, I work in the following ways: spec; day rates; day rates + mileage; hourly; per game; per player (including prints) and other ways that are custom for a given assignment.