I have seen a lot of sport snapshots that are quite disappointing, like blurry, too dark or too still. Yes, just because a photograph is dead sharp, it doesn’t mean that it’s good if the colours are washed out by flash and everything is so still. Of course by no means I am a professional in sports photography, however I would like to share a tip or two that can help common folks like us take good photographs.

First things first, be prepared the day before, the usual routine: charge up your batteries (bring spares if possible), clear out your memory cards, make sure your camera is in working order. Sports photogrphy is very demanding, a silly tehnical faults such as memory card errors and low battery can bring a lot of grief.

Tools of trade:

• A zoom lens, preferrably one that goes up to 300mm
• Flash, in case we need one
• Monopod (if you have one) – I didn’t us one on the day

The important technique to understand with sports photogrphy is to allow movements to be recorded into you photographs. Your shutter should be fast enough yet slow enough to alow some movement blur (not camera shake). On the day I didn’t use any flash at all, it was bright enough and I use quite a high iso. The reason I didn’t use the flash were first I’m not a fan of flash harsh lights and second I didn’t want to distract the players with the flashes.

Play It manually.

If you are shooting indoor like I do, then chances are that the lights are pretty consistent. Set your camera to manual exposure. You can either use a light meter to do this or simply by trial and error. This way your shots will be consistent in their exposures, less chance of stuff ups due to the camera miscalculating the exposures in fast conditions.

Have depth of field.

With sports photography you want your photos to be focused to the players. Using high aperture settings such as f3.5 or f4.5 will help achieve the depth of field required. The background surrounding will be blurred enough to accentuate your subject but still clear enough to give a sense of location.

Think about who is your subject.

Maybe this does not apply to all sports, but for Kendo, in case you haven’t notice the players wear full faced mask. There is very little chance we can recognize their face easily, that is why they have the name tags. Be sure include the name in some of your shots, but don’t overdo it.

It might also pay off to include some of the surroundings as well. In case of the photo on the left, it was the judges. By including the judges in the background we have set up the serious and tense atmosphere.

Focus, focus and focus

In these situations as I have mentioned above, we will be shooting with zoom lens and high aperture. Therefore your focussing is of utmost importance. Make sure your subject is well focused, missing the focusing even one but will ruin the image. Set your camera to continuous focus or if you are on single auto focusing mode, always try to obtain focus before shooting.

Move it!

Technical details aside, we have to keep in mind that sports is about movements. Your subject will be moving around a lot…and you should be too. I don’t stay in one spot all the time (unless I have to due to limited space, regulations,etc ). There are many things that will obstruct you, never with for them to move away, you have to move away. So stand up and walk to the most suitable spots.

Other important thing to remember would be to shoot in RAW and don’t be stingy, shoot as much as possible and you will have more chance to select your best photographs. So to conclude, sport photography is about capturing the atmosphere, movements and most importantly the players. It can be frustrating, but will be an utmost joy for you and the participants when you have a great results in the end.

To some people it is a time to have fun and to some people it is an opportunity to practice the night shot. Yes, slow shutter, tripods, lights and fast movements. This year I’m rather pleased with some of my shots, since I actually brought by tripod again. Last year I came out with very little usable night shots simply because I can’t be bothered to bring a tripod (so I can do more things with less hassle).

Slow shutter hand held

That doesn’t mean that without a tripod you can’t take any picture, all you have to do is know your minimal shutter speed, ISO and steady hands. The shot on the left was shot hand-held at 1/30 s, f/3.5 ISO 800. The resulting image shows how fast the movements were and it actually gives a hint of happy people on board the ride. Thanks to the bright lights from the ride itself, the children on board were illuminated quite well!

Here’s another picture (right) that I took hand held, good lighting in the venue really helps with these shots. When it comes to fireworks however, there is no escaping from using a tripod. There are also different pointers and tips that I’d like to share with you when taking picture of fireworks.

Photographing Fireworks

If your camera is capable for full manual control, this is the time to switch it on. Forget about auto-focus and auto exposure, most camera will not be able to calculate the settings correctly. What I did was:

1. Set the focusing to infinity. Auto focusing will be quite hard or impossible since there is nothing to focus in the sky until the moment the fireworks started and it’ll be too late.

2. Set your aperture high to preserve the details (around F16 and above).

3. Set the speed around 2-4 seconds. With this low speed, the fireworks trails can be recorded and more fireworks can be captured.

4. Set the camera trigger to wireless remote (or you can set timer for 2 secs or lower), this was needed to avoid camera shake by hand when pressing the trigger button.

5. Arrive early to get a good (and if possible comfy) spot.

And that should do for the settings. As for the picture taking, I mount my camera on the tripod and adjust the position to where I estimate where the fireworks will be displayed. Then, just enjoy the show while snapping the pic (peering into the viewfinder and adjusting as well obviously).

Moomba Fireworks

The picture on the right was taken using f/25, 4 s, this way the fireworks trails was evident and the smoke appears hazy. There are a lot to learn about photographing fireworks and I’m still learning as I go as well. However the pointers above are the ones that I have learnt and applied for a while. The fireworks was not the only exciting thing however, there was this rock band playing pretty good music too.

Of course because this is a photography blog, I can’t help but to share a bit of phototaking for these kind of situation. A band, low light and glaring spotlights, requires something more than full automatic settings.

I shot those two using spot metering and speed priority mode. In order to get the singer’s face into the correct exposure, spot metering on the face is needed, otherwise the camera will think that the scene is too dark and it’ll boost the exposure. Usually leaving us with very bright white faces…overexposure. On the other hand I left it to the speed priority mode to get a decent hand-held speed (about 1/200 for the above shots) while maintaining the correct aperture settings automatically. Apart from that the iso was set to 1600, a bit grainy, but it does the job.

Hmm…and the last thing, I can’t help but think that some clown statue can be quite scary…they should be made cuter or funnier…

Festivities!

Good thing I brought the camera, because such view like the one you see on the left is not something that you would normally see. Everyone went out and enjoyed the day. I mean, look at it, the picture on the right.

The watchers, the dragon...

The sides of the parking lot is just full of people, watching the Chinese Dragon.

In a situation like that one, an SLR would have been great. First its faster at focusing, secondly there’s the wide angle lens which would have covered more and hence captured the moment better.  Well, that’s a lesson, don’t be lazy to lug around your equipment, especially on such a good day.

Another thing to remember is always pay attention of the surrounding. Who knows, maybe we’ll capture something very interesting.

The festival on the day amazingly reaches almost every part of Chinatown, going though the shops and throughout the street. Its almost as if we are in Asia on the day.

The Lion and the Shops and the firecracker, you can almost hear how loud it was...

Street Stalls, here's something you don't see everyday in Melbourne

It was such a good day, especially if you think that  another 43degree day is coming tomorrow.

Southern Star Observation Wheel

Today I was fortunate enough to be able to go out and enjoy the festivities of the long weekend on Australia Day, in particular at Docklands. There are bands, attractions, people and lots of stuff to see.

Sand Sculpture at Docklands

Check out the sand sculpture to the left for example, isn’t it amazing? The description said that it took 1 tonnes of sand to make this sculpture, incredible. Also to our surprise, this piece of art can withstand 3 days of rain!

While I was strolling about the complex and taking a few photos, I suddenly remembered the thing about cameras that most people do not really understand how to use, and that’s the metering mode. I have this sudden jolt of idea to put this up in this blog when I took the picture of the interesting entertainer on the right.

Horsemen Underexposed

The picture of this funny “horsemen musicians” was very dark when I previewed it. I was using aperture priority mode (I control the aperture the camera decides the shutter speed) with matrix metering. That’s when I immediately remembered to change the metering mode in my camera to fix this. Of course there is another way to avoid this kind of problem by ensuring the right direction of the light source, checkout the “Frequently Missed Items” post.

A quick look at the metering modes

At the very basic level, most of modern cameras would have: matix metering, centre weight metering and spot metering.

When using matrix metering, the camera estimates the amount of light needed to capture an image by averaging the light intensity in different parts of the image. So if you have a camera with say 15 dynamic areas metering, it means the camera basically divided the current scene into 15 areas and uses them to average out the light needed. The downside of using matrix metering is when the subject is dark and the background is very light, the camera is fooled into thinking that there is enough light needed, like the horsemen underexposed picture.

The solution that I decided to use is setting my camera into centre weight metering where the camera uses the centre part of the image as an average area of reference for its calculation. You can normally see the area used for the centre weight metering calculation through your viewfinder; ie. the round marking in the middle.

Horsemen Centre Weight

After using that metering, there result is as “Horsemen Centre Weight” picture. The camera is no longer fooled by the light background.

Another more accurate solution is the spot metering, with this activated, the camera relies on a certain point in the scene as the point of reference. Normally this can be seen in your viewfinder as the smaller circle or the square right in the middle of the scene. I used this metering to take a picture of the band below. The scene was tricky because the subject moved around and most of the background was very light.

Band Underexposed

Band Right Exposure

I locked the spot exposure on one of the band personnel, compose the scene and took the picture.

More festivities

Mini Children Tennis

As I moved on, more interesting attractions are scattered along the area. Even the excitement of Australia Open can be felt here, from the big screen and from the children playing.

I’d have to say that this area has become much more alive than it used to be a few years ago. Lots of shops, restaurant and of course the Southern Star Observation Wheel are now in business. With the weather as nice as today, it was indeed a great day out for recreation!

Docklands Shops	Festivities at Docklands
Melbourne Sunny day

The buildings remains the same as it was when I went here a few years ago, time seems to go slower here. If we look at the picture of the houses, those are the typical house + shop buildings.

Among other things however one of the best activities that I did was hunting for food. My favourite would be the traditional food called “Nasi Gandul”.

Its most prominent characteristics is having to place the food on top of a sheet of banana leave, giving the dish a very traditional look. I’m not quite sure what part of the cattle is the meat , all I know is that this food taste great and I love it! By the way, this is why we have to bring our camera everywhere including restaurants, so that we can take a picture of those different looking foods.

That was all exciting, unfortunately there are some sad aspect of this city (probably throughout the nation); it is the fact that most of the historical and old buildings are not being cared for. Take a look at the picture below, this was the once great looking sports hall, now a “ghost” looking hall.

From this city, I then moved on to a village, kind of rural suburb area I guess; it was called Trangkil.

Trangkil Sugar Factory

This place was once one of the biggest sugar factory in Central Java during the time of Dutch Colonial. I went there because my Grandpa was one of the head machinist in that sugar factory. Let’s take a look of the few shots that I took during the visit:

Although looking like a worn out factory, according to the caretaker there, this factory is actually operational. Too bad they didn’t take care of the facility like it used to be, could have been a good tourist attraction, especially there are still a lot of younger visitors who are the family members of the ones who used to work here. The saddest part is when the caretaker said that the last remaining old building will be destroyed as well.

The factory visit was a great thing to look at a portion of the Indonesian history.

Photo Tips: In the dark places like the factory machines above, use high ISO settings and the highest aperture (eg. f/2.8) possible to ensure sharp result. If you use a zoom lens, use the lowest focal length.

From the visits in Pati I then moved to the Semarang city. It is much larger than Pati and more modern in a sense. As usual however, I prefer to visit historical places. I’d like to show you one of the interesting place in there, the Pagoda Avalokitsvara.

This is a realtively new place with great aesthetics. Maybe with a little bit more publication it can be a good addition to the city’s tourism. The pictures that I took here could have been better. The rainy day when I came here didn’t help with the photography aspect of the visit . Here’s a little bit more shots from the site.

All in all, I am delighted to say that my trip had been a wonderful one. Great sites to see, great historical view, great food and most of all great chance to take good photos!

I hope that you all have a wonderful holiday and great times.

As quick tips for those who will be travelling:

1. Don’t forget to bring your wider angle lens, along 18-28 mm. This is so that you can capture the scenery and not forgetting where you have been.
2. Bring your flash, as you’ll never know when you need to shoot indoors.
3. Charge up your camera at the end of each day.
4. Dump your photos into a portable storage or your laptop if you have them, so that you have more room to shoot.

Personally I’m quite pleased with the materials covered here and I am also pleased to hear the audiences find that the workshop was useful (from the conversation with different people). In the beginning I was quite worried about the turnout rate: I kept thinking whether this lecture theater gonna end up empty.

The turnout rate turns out to be great!! The theater was quite crowded and people were listening intently to the presentations.

As Joe and Jon moves towards the meat of the presentation, I could see that people are getting more and more interested. This workshop’s materials were very different from the standard job seeking advices. It wasn’t just about resume and cover letter, it was about our attitude and habit. It was about improving ourselves to overcome fear in trying something new, learn top make mistake and learn to accept or hear bad responses.

I believe this kind of workshop can alleviate Golden Key RMIT into a more professional level and help giving back to its members as well as the student community.

This was a great presentation and in the future, this kind of workshop is not to be missed. I’m planning to hold another professional workshop in the future, the topic will depends on the interest of the community.

More Pictures

Photography Takeaway

Right, you might think that this kind of workshop have nothing to do with photography? Well there are a few things that we can takeaway from attending this kind of workshop (and taking photos):

1. You learn how to build up your skills to get a good job in photography
2. You get to practice your indoor photography skills. The images in this post are taken without flash, the requirement is to use a fast lens and high ISO. The fastest lens that I have is my trusty Tamron f/2.8, it does the job wonderfully. Open up the aperture to the max and ISO as high as possible, you’ll get a sharp shot.
3. If you don’t have a fast lens, then bring a powerful flash such as Nikon SB-600 or Nikon SB-800

More workshop images can be seen at http://www.goldenkey-rmit.org.

BenchmarkEdu can be found in: http://benchmarkedu.blogspot.com/

The Melbourne Motor Show, always a good place to admire cool and interesting cars…and of course, taking photographs of them.

One of the thing that interests me a lot is that many of the concept cars in there are hybrid cars. I guess most of the car manufacturers are going green due to the global movement towards “less carbon emission”… anyway, this is a photography blog so I’m not gonna to the whole environmental discussion

A spark of different addition is the participation of Bolwell, the Australian “Ferrari”. Nice looking car with a smaller engine than most of the exotic cars.

Other sport cars includes the new Hyundai Genesis Coupe, Ford and of course other familiar players like Ferrari.

Star of the Show

Located in a modest corner of the exhibition without is the promoted star of the show, the Bugatti Veyron. This fastest car in the world stopped only for 3 days, which no doubt attracted some of the crowd to visit the exhibition sooner. Deviating into photography topic a bit, notice that I take a picture of the information board in order to tell the story through the picture.

The Veyron is not the only star as far as I can see. I think the car on the left, the Lexus LS600hs is much more interesting. Its ability to automate parking procedure is quite an advancement in the car industry. Notice on the left that the lady didn’t even touch the steering wheel while the car is parking. I was at the right place and time to take a quick snap when the demonstration happened .

The Other…

The motorbike on the left is considered the “other”, I have no other words. Standing tall like a monster truck this motorbike is the biggest motorbike in the world. Apparently this motorbike is being used in destruction shows, where it flattened different normal cars.

Interesting addition to the show. Anyway, it was pretty hard to get a whole shot of this thing due to its size although I was using an 17mm lens.

It was great going to the car show, it is very interesting to see the technologies out there.

Photography Take Away

By going to shows like this one, there are a couple points that we can learn from photography stand point.

1. Be on the lookout for interesting demonstration.
2. Be patient when photographing, there are hundreds of people in the arena and they will most likely walk in front of you.
3. Take your time, don’t be hasty, there are plenty to look at. Refrain from going home in the first 30-60 minutes. This is important as demonstrations are done on particular times only.
4. Look at the exhibition booklet in order to properly understand the arena.

So what can we expect from this lens?

First thing, this is a 1:1 Macro lens, meaning that it is capable of creating 1:1 image reproduction of the actual object; although if the “limit switch” (not shown in this picture) is turned off, you can get much closer than 1:1 scale. I have been testing this lens for a while and quite please with the resulting images, the depth of field is great and the sharpness of the resulting image is very pleasing. On the right is an example of a necklace pendant taken using this lens under studio lights.

More on the specs…

One of the most important spec is the focal length. This camera came with a fixed focal length at 90mm, meaning there’s no zoom in and out. Some might disagree however I think when I’m photographing outdoor with this lens for non product object, such as a person, it forces me to be more creative and to make the most out of the available space at the time of the shoot. So with this I can also say that this lens is not just for close-ups, instead can be a great companion for a portrait shoot.

Another interesting aspect of this lens is that availability of a manual aperture ring, a feature that is not very common in the era of digital, in particular with less-expensive lens like this one. Of course with the digital SLR camera the ring is not being used very much however with my F-801s film that does not support electronic aperture ring, the manual ring is a handy addition.

Lastly and handy

The last prominent and most handy feature of this lens is the AF (Auto Focus) and M (Manual Focus) switch, in order to switch to and fro between those two, all I have to do is just pulling or pushing the focusing ring. Notice that you can see a blue “M” and white “AF” writing on the lens, that’s where the focusing ring would “clicks” in. So there’s no more fiddling around with the small on camera body AF/MF switch. This is especially great when taking picture and the auto-focus won’t focus properly.

So why is there any catch with the half price of Nikkor?

Alhough this lens is one of the sturdy lens, compared to the Nikkor it feels more plasticky and in addition the focussing speed is slower than the nikkor lens. However eventhough I knew these things existed, they didn’t threw me off my decision to get this lens. As long as it focuses well, takes 1:1 macro reproduction, able to productng clear and high quality image, its all good. The sturdiness at this point is enough for me, after all, I don’t intent to throw my lens to the floor.

All in all this is a great lens!

I have to say that I’m very glad that I get this one, and it’ll be useful for years to come So if you’re getting a macro lens, consider this one!