Swim photos

For some reason it's hard for me to keep up at this. I really seem to have issues with keeping up with what I've been up to. I'll try to be more concise and make more posts.

Since the last post, my next assignment was shooting swimming. This was an invitational swim meet between about 8 area high schools. Which brought up one of the harder parts, getting names. I had to watch the scoreboard to gather who was in what lane and what school they were. I got the hang of it after a while.

Swimming pools are severely dark areas. Also, the false-start signal is also a light flash, so I can't shoot at the start with a flash, which by the way is usually one of the good points to shoot.

After some careful bum-kissery I was able to persuade the swimming director person to allow me to use flash as long as I didn't take pictures during the start. I'd have been dead in the water (pun!!) if I hadn't gotten permission for that.

With something like this I usually just make it simple and shoot it like any other sport. The less equipment, the better. I set up two flashes cross lighting the pool as best as I could. Same kind of thing as at a basketball game or volleyball.

This kind of looks unnatural, but there wasn't much else I could really do. I definitely didn't want to have to try to power up my flashes and bounce them into the ceiling (which was very high by the way).

Instead I got this crazy backlight thing going on. It makes things pop and the action is stopped pretty well, but it does look rather unnatural. Interesting, but nonetheless unnatural.

I've never had to shoot water sports before so I really liked the challenge. I wish I'd have had more ability to be alone by the water. There were a ton of other swimmers there and they were all trying to be right on the edge of the pool. Something I was told wasn't going to be allowed by the judges. But support of one's mates is not something with which I'd want to interfere.

One thing that really annoyed me with shooting with my flashes was that one of my strobes is used as an optical slave (triggered by the light of the first flash). This means that every time Everyday Mom uses her pop up flash on her camera, my flash goes off and then of course needs to recharge for a second. I had a lot of every-other-picture shots where one was light, the next was dark. Solution, pay for more remotes.

Along with laps were also diving photos. Diving is an interesting thing to shoot because you've got people contorting and eventually landing right in the water. I really like the frozen looks of the people's bodies. However, the facial expressions, like many sports, always look odd. This picture was nice because you can actually see her trying to spot her landing. Very tight turning move.

The picture above is the one that the paper actually used. Strangely I didn't gather that they only wanted images from a select school's swimmers so I had a plethora of images which weren't of the right team. Oh well, I got some good action shots for myself.

I think that's something to take away from your assignments. Not only are you shooting for your paper, but you're also shooting for your portfolio. You can't just go shooting safe pictures or you'll never get good stuff for future employers to look at. You've got to be out there taking shots of things that will get people to look at your work and say, "wow!" I mean, look at Chase Jarvis. That guy pays to do stuff to attract attention:


(better quality if you download off iTunes)

I'll leave it there. A lot of the stuff in that little video is stuff that you can do with a couple of flashes and some willing friends/models. Creativity is what gets you work.