Fine Tuning New Techniques During Spring Football

The spring games that college football teams host for fans and media every year to get their first glimpse of their new team is generally meaningless. Yes, it's a nice chance to get a look at redshirt freshmen or the new recruits who enrolled early but for the most part,  even though the spring game looks like football it's nowhere near close to the real thing. There are no big hits, quarterbacks are protected and it happens at about half speed. For someone like me, though, it's a great opportunity to practice some shooting techniques I've been working on. And, after a few months without football it's nice to see anything resembling the real thing. 

The first technique I worked on was my exposure. I've always underexposed my photos for fear of clipping highlights and not being able to recover that data in post processing, and because of that I sometimes end up with photos that have harsh shadows blacking out the players' faces, which is no good when you're trying to sell these photos. This game I made sure to slightly overexpose the image to get a nice clear look at their faces and I had some good practice doing so because it was a cloudy afternoon and the light was constantly changing. It felt a little odd at first as I was chimping at my photos but once I accepted that I wasn't coming close to clipping any highlights I got used to it. And I have to say ... these photos came out so much cleaner than I would've expected. It sounds silly and obvious to say, but the proper exposure makes all the difference. 

The second thing I worked on was getting over my fear of cropping. Last season I ran into bad luck with schedules and had to shoot nothing but night games. Because of that, I had to shoot with high ISOs like 5000 and 6400 because of the 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L I'm using and I lost the opportunity to crop because my photos were already grainy to start. On this day I was able to shoot with ISO 100-400 and since the image was so sharp I was able to crop in a lot on the photos and ended up with a ton more isolated action photos than I normally do. 

It's a bummer that these aren't legit game photos because I'm really happy with the results but this practice will pay off once the regular season starts in September. 

SMU Basketball In The National Spotlight

SMU is in the middle of a remarkable season right now. Looks like Hall of Fame head coach Larry Brown has his program where SMU alumni and fans prayed they would be. I wrote more about this here: Game Changer.

In my last blog post I wrote about wanting to shooting a basketball game with a 70-200mm f/2.8L. Well, I got my hands on one and the results were pretty great. That lens is pretty much as versatile as can be for a basketball game. With the 200mm range I was able to capture shots across the court with some crispness. The only other lens I've seen with more versatility than the 70-200 is the 28-300mm f3.5-5.6L. Unfortunately, though, because the lens' widest aperture is 3.5 it's probably best to only use that lens if you have access to strobes in the arena.

I feel like I got some decent variety from this game, but I'm realizing that I can do a better job of capturing detail shots. I saw a great example of this here on Exposure.Co by the Clemson University athletic department on gameday. 

Even In A Loss The Mustangs Look Great At Moody Coliseum

This week I went to Moody Coliseum to watch the SMU Mustangs basketball team take on the Cincinnati Bearcats. At the time the Mustangs were ranked No. 23 in the country in both the Associated Press and USA Today Coaches polls, but couldn't take care of business and lost to the Bearcats 54-62 as well as their ranking. I wrote a story about it here.

I have a lot of opinions on the team but this is a blog about my getting better at photography. Shooting basketball is a whole different beast from shooting football. For one, not all basketball arenas have good lighting. I graduated from the University of North Texas and their basketball arena known as The Super Pit had terrible lighting. If you were trying to use the available light there you'd have to shoot at around ISO 4000 or 5000 just to really freeze the action and get rid of any motion blur. And with high ISOs like that you're not walking away with crips shots--plenty of grain. That, of course, is if you're not using strobes, which you're probably not unless you're shooting for a newspaper or the athletic department. SMU's newly renovated Moody Coliseum has fantastic lighting, though.

Without using a strobe I was shooting around ISO 1600 to 2000 at F2.8 and a shutter speed of 1/1000 or 1/1250 to really freeze the action. I'm limited in the lens department so my 85mm 1.8 was the workhorse. It's sharp enough that I can crop images and they'll maintain their sharpness but I missed out on a lot of photos because the action was too close to me at times and the 85mm was too tight to get a decent shot. In a perfect world I'd have two camera bodies. One with a 70-200mm F/2.8 and the other with a 16-35mm F/2.8 for extra wide angles.

A recent thing I've picked up about shooting basketball is that it's best when shot vertically or in a portrait style. If it's shot horizontally or in a landscape style there's usually so much dead space that it hurts the impact of the photo. So when a player's around the perimeter or in the paint I'll shoot vertically but when a player makes a move to the basket for a dunk or a layup I'll try to capture all the action around the basket in horizontal or landscape mode. On this night that really worked for me and I captured some of my favorite basketball shots to date. 

My goal for my next basketball game is to have a 70-200mm F/2.8 with me to capture more action and get more variety of course. A variety of shots is I'm always lacking when I walk away from a shoot. 

Our Only Pope

Whenever you spend time around a team you start to learn a lot about the players you see on the field. In the last two seasons I've been covering SMU football one of the guys who's stood out to me the most is Kevin Pope (3). He is currently SMU's starting inside linebacker and team captain--he is the leader of team. But what makes his story intriguing is that he is in his fifth season with the Mustangs after being granted an extra year of eligibility due to an injury he suffered earlier in his collegiate career and it just so happens that this is one of SMU's worst seasons on record, who are currently winless. It's such a shame for a player of Pope's caliber, who will do anything for his team and he proved that when he played running back in the beginning of the season because his team needed help at that position. After moving back to linebacker and having a great game, I spoke to his coach about the kind of athlete and man Pope is. 

This is a story I originally wrote for Central Track

The SMU Mustangs lost their seventh game of the season on Saturday to the Memphis Tigers, a conference foe, 10-48. 

Yup, it was bad.

Worse, the loss officially eliminated the team from being bowl-eligible, and insured the Mustangs of finishing with a losing record.

There's no denying this has been a terrible season for the Mustangs all around, and the near-empty Ford Stadium in the second half on Saturday proved that this team has lost what little remained of its support. The product on the field isn't pretty, and, statistically, SMU is the worst team in the FBS. SMU is the only winless team in the country, ranks last in scoring offense and scoring defense, last in total defense and second to last in total offense. 

Yikes.

A season like this was definitely not what senior Kevin Pope envisioned for his team heading into the season. After missing the 2010 and 2011 seasons due to injury and earning a medical waiver, Pope is in his fifth and final year with the Mustangs -- and he undoubtedly didn't want to end his collegiate career this way. 

Last season, Pope led the team with 91 tackles from the linebacker position. After several injuries at running back, Pope then started getting carries at that position as well, while still keeping up his defensive duties on the other side of the ball. Coming into this season, he earned the No. 1 running back position, but with the paralyzing struggles the offense has had thus far -- including a four-way round-robin quarterback shuffle -- interim head coach Tom Mason thought Pope would be more valuable to his team if he returned to his linebacker role for the rest of the season. 

Last week against Cincinnati, in his first action at linebacker this season, Pope stepped in and recorded seven tackles. This weekend against Memphis, he led the team with 12 tackles and also recorded a sack. 

"You gotta love that kid," Interim head coach Tom Mason said. "I wish I had 20 of him. We wouldn't be sitting here talking about problems if I had 20 kids like Kevin Pope."

In the second half of this week's game, after things were already way out of hand, starting running back Prescott Line was on the sideline having an ankle injury attended to. And after backup running back Luke Seeker sustained a huge hit, it appeared as if Pope was lobbying for some carries. Still, Mason stuck to his plan of keeping Pope on defense only. 

"Kevin is one of those kids," Mason said. "He'd go both ways. He'd take 90 snaps on defense and 70 snaps on offense and he'd go down in heat exhaustion. That's the kind of kid he is."

For a senior who was fortunate enough to play college football for one more year, his effort has shown gratitude this season. He's certainly leaving it all on the field. 

"I just want to bring a different mentality toward the defense and go out there and just be a vocal leader and help them play better," Pope said when asked about his efforts this season. "I just want to go out there and play as hard as I can and spark the defense."

To his credit, the losing season hasn't affected Pope or his play on the field. For now, the team's lone bright spot is only concerned with going out every play and giving it his all.

The Warm-Up Shots

When it comes to editing down photos for my photo essays I rarely include shots from warm-ups. For some reason they feel inauthentic -- almost cheap in a way. Warm-ups are a great opportunity to get candid photos of a star athlete, but it's such a casual shot that it hardly fits into the flow of the usually intense action photos. 

There was one photo essay in which I used two warm-up shots in a photo essay when SMU played Texas A&M because they were high-profile, impact players (Ricky Seals-Jones & Kenny Hill, who are in the gallery above) I felt deserved a little extra attention but if I would've been able to get a better game shot of the two I would've easily chosen the latter. I guess, in a way, I use warm-up shots as a crutch in case I feel like my game shots are lacking a bit.