We had our sports assignment to turn in this week. This project was actually more fun than I thought it would be. I always kind of thought shooting sports would be annoying and tricky. I was wrong on the annoying part, but it is pretty tricky. Or at least it can be.
I ended up going to a USC mens tennis match against the ASU Mountaineers. I was glad I found a tennis event to go to, because I played tennis for years when I was younger. Sometimes I just miss the atmosphere of tennis, so I thought this would a nice reason to go out to a game. Also, I figured I already kind of knew what was going on on the court, so I could better judge when something was going to happen that I might want a photo of. I was also looking for an outdoor event, because I thought the lighting would be nicer.
Shooting the match ended up pretty fun. I got side tracked every once in a while and started watching the game, instead of focusing on taking pictures. Other than that, I just kept my settings on Tv, used fast shutter speeds to capture the moment without blur, and set my ISO to 200 since it a sunny day. Unfortunately I didn’t bring a longer lens, so I couldn’t get the close ups I really wanted. I couldn’t get on the court, so I was stuck in the bleacher section. With a longer lens I could have gotten those closer shots and kept them in focus too. What I ended up turning in were some images I shot that I cropped in photoshop to be closer up. The quality would have been much better though if I had brought a longer lens, since most of my details are a little out of focus or blurry since I cropped so much. So the issue I ran into was that the players closest to me were facing the other direction, and the players facing me were just too far away to get really nice clear pictures of. Lesson learned. Next time I’ll be better prepared.
Even if I wasn’t 100% happy with these pictures, I still had a great time on this assignment. I think I definitely enjoyed this more than most of the projects we’ve had so far. Who knew that I would actually like sports photography? I guess it is exactly like people always say; you won’t know until you try.
Two of the many pictures I took for the assignment:
© Selina Westerwelle 2010
© Selina Westerwelle 2010
These two images are from two of the three doubles matches that USC played against ASU.
The USC tennis team went on to win the match-up with ASU 5-2.
