Sunday, September 6, 2009

Boerne-Champion & TMI Football...the season is underway


Another busy weekend and it started on a Thursday. I'd forgotten the joys of shooting football in the afternoon with good light, but the images from Thursday's JV game between TMI, The Episcopal School of Texas, and Pearsall made for an easy reminder. Not only was the light good, but the photos show why you don't need to be shooting pro or college sports to get peak action, intense player emotion images.

The Boerne-Champion vs San Antonio East Central game on Friday started early enough to get some nice pre-game photos, particularly with the great yellow and black helmets of East Central. As I've written about in the past, to get really sharp images you almost always have to use strobe lighting at high school fields. The downside of strobes includes batteries, low light on long distance shots, uneven lighting depending where the play is on the field, setting ISO too high so you pick up the ambient light on the field when you really just want your flash to be doing the work...which usually means blurring.

So given all that fun stuff, when half the lights went out at Boerne High School stadium it looked photography was going to come to a standstill. But Forrest Gump would have been proud, with only half the stadium lights working we had some really interesting portrait light to work with and the players all had their helmets off. How cool... Here's one of my favorites...