Sam’s Club
So, tonight was the #5 UNC v UVA men’s basketball game. Probably the biggest game of the season for UVA’s John Paul Jones Arena… all the local media and photogs were there, plus a bunch of others from NC and around the country. Students showed up which was nice after shooting a dozen or so games over winter break with no students around. This shot is of a group of students who were wearing Sam’s Club vests in honor of Virginia point guard Sammy Zeglinski.
I was pretty happy with how things turned out. My remotes worked. My lights worked.
Tip Off
ACC season has already started and is coming to JPJ soon. This shot was taken from the catwalk at tip off of last night’s women’s game vs St. Francis. The PocketWizards that trigger my strobe system were once again not working, and I went up just before the start of the game to find out why. Channels had been changed… again… Not cool. 
So, I was upstairs for tip off and took this shot. It was a fairly interesting game — not as exciting as the Georgia game, but St. Francis held on for a lot longer than they were expected to (35-35 at half), largely on some pretty nice 3 point shooting and lots of UVA turnovers. Virginia took control in the second half….
Smoking in black and white
Today has been a get things done in the office day… there are no basketball games so I’ve been cleaning, organizing, paying bills, keywording and pulling some images from my archive to send to a colleague. I came across this photo that I took back in June 2008 out in Mendocino, California. The photographer in the picture is Dan Heller (who writes a very insightful blog on the photography business). Dan led a workshop that I was attending that week and this was one of the many people we came across. She was our waitress a the local restaurant that we all stopped by for lunch and then we saw her walking on the street smoking a cigarette… more me the intriguing part of the moment wasn’t so much there was a young woman walking down the street smoking but rather that there were 4 or 5 photographers taking her photo.
Xavier’s Kenny Frease from Above
The #22 Xavier men’s NCAA basketball team came to town to play UVA. Remote camera and Pocketwizard Gremlins appear to have been tamed and things started clicking for the first time in several games. This image was taken from the catwalk above one of the baskets. Since I cannot consistently lag my Canon 1D Mark III (shutter lag values range all over the place), I occasionally use this body up from above with either my 180mm macro lens (as I did today) or 70-200mm and set to shoot on ambient light. I place it on the side of the court where I’m sitting shooting with my hand held — every time I fire my hand held camera this remote is listening on the same channel as the strobes are and it fires 4-6 frames each time. The result is that I often get several frames in an aerial view of a good play where I only can get one shot with my strobed hand held. It’s a nice combination.
Holiday Hoops
My assignment last night had me shooting more high school hoops… the local paper and TV station sponsored a tournament for all of the area high schools and there were several games. The photo above is of Michael Glover from Spotswood HS — his team beat Charlottesville HS 48-47 in pretty dramatic fashion. Spotswood led 48-46 with 4 seconds left, CHS inbounded to their star Kevin Leatherwood who drove in the lane and was fouled. Leatherwood hit his first free throw while the second shot fell short. Game over.
I lit the gym, much as I have done in the past. Two Canon 580EX Speedlights, manual mode, 1/2 power, zoomed at 50mm (it’s very important to make sure custom function #14 on these model is set to “1″, else your lights will auto power off). With that, I was able to roughly get 1/250, f/4.5, iso640… not bad for a cave. I used a hot-shoe to PC adapter attached to each strobe and then attached on the bottom to the little feet/stand that comes with the flash. The foot is then attached to the base plate of a magic arm with super clamp and attached to the top of the bleachers in the two corners on the side that I’m shooting. I connected the flash via the PC port on the adapter to a PocketWizard Multimax, positioned the light to shine roughly just above the free throw line/key area and test to make sure everything works. I then attach a safety cable to tie down anything that could fall if someone were to bump/mess with my light and I’m good to go. It takes about 4 minutes per light, 8-10 minutes total.
Someone’s Number 1
Today was a doubleheader of women’s hoops — the first round of the Marriott Cavalier Classic at UVA. I had to get there 3 hours before the first game to set up my remotes, which was pretty much a worthless endeavor since I was having trouble with my lights / remotes again. I suspect the PocketWizard Multimax that’s used to sequence my remote cameras is out of whack and/or needing to run off of batteries instead of wall power. Or perhaps it needs to be swapped out with a different PW — I’ll find out tomorrow during the two games I’m shooting then. I hope to have this year’s gremlins out of the system before Xavier comes to town on the 3rd…
More photos from LA Tech vs UMBC
Images from #15 Virginia vs Rider
My Copyright Registration Workflow
I often get questions from fellow photographers about my copyright registration process. I separate published images from unpublished images and register published images with the United States Copyright Office once every 75 days. Registering published images 5 times a year helps maintain the 90 day registration window for published images to ensure they are fully protected by any potential infringement. I usually register my unpublished images once or twice a year. All of my registrations, unless there’s a specific circumstance requiring otherwise, are group registrations. Generally, if it goes up on my website or is sent to a client for publication, it’s marked as published. Everything else is unpublished. I’ll go through the details of how/what I do below.
The first step is to get Best Business Practices for Photographers
I use a few software packages to make things easier. These instructions are based on the tools I have and the workflow that I’ve put together — if you have different packages, tools, approach; adjust accordingly. I ingest all of my photos directly from the compact flash card into Photo Mechanic.
This part is important: I create my file names in such a way as to include the date of publication (for published images) or the date of creation (for unpublished images) in the file name, along with other identifying information that’s helpful. For example, if I shoot a basketball game on December 23, 2008 the file name may look something like:
20081223 – Hampton at Virginia (NCAA Basketball)-A113024.jpg
The first 8 numbers are the date of publication (or creation for unpublished). Since this event was shot on the 23rd, the date remains the same… if for instance, I wasn’t able to publish this image until the 24th or later, I would change the first 8 digits in the file name to reflect the date of publication. Then I have a text description of what the file/event was about, followed by a serial number (which Photo Mechanic automatically augments using the {seqn} tag). If the image goes into my unpublished folder, and is later published, I rename to match the date of publication, and move to my current published folder. If you don’t do this, or otherwise denote when images were published, you’ll get a letter or phone call from the copyright office, further delaying your registration. If your group registration contains several thousand images, this could be a major problem and cause a big headache — it’s much easier to keep track of everything at the time of publication and creation and I do so through the file name (there’s also metadata but that seems to not be as easy to deal with for the Copyright Office).
I shoot exclusively in RAW — my selections for publication (website or otherwise) are marked in Photo Mechanic with color codes (1 through 9) depending on their priority. I then select all of the desired images and do basic edits with Adobe’s Camera Raw (part of Photoshop) and create JPEGs from the RAW files. Then, if needed, I do additional edits in Photoshop. I caption, keyword, and apply metadata to my images back in Photo Mechanic and then transmit to my PhotoShelter enabled-website, client, etc.
From there, I open up Adobe Lightroom. I import the folder containing the images I just created. Then in LR I go to Edit -> Select By Color Label -> No Label — this selects all of the images in the folder that had no color tag applied to them and are therefore designated in my system as unpublished. I then go to File -> Export where I enter in the various settings roughly as follows: Files on disk; Folder – the location where you want the images for registration to go; Template – filename; Format: JPEG; Quality: 70; Color Space: AdobeRGB (1998); Resize to fit: Long edge; 800 pixels, 72dpi;
This can be automated by defining a “user preset”. In the same export window, click on “Add” to add a user preset, name it “Unpublished Copyright” or “Published Copyright” — apply your desired settings, save them, and then you’ll see the show up in the File -> Export with Preset option.
After exporting the unpublished images, I then go to Edit -> Invert Selection — this then selects all of the images that I have color tags (and therefore marked for publication) in Photo Mechanic. I do the same process as above for unpublished images, except I make sure these images go into my pre-designated published images folder.
The benefit of using Lightroom, especially for my workflow is that I don’t have to create a separate batch of JPEG images from RAW files to create JPEGs to send to the copyright office. Lightroom creates the reduced sized images for me and I don’t have to store the extra high-res JPEG. For me, this saves time, disk space and frustration.
I use John’s naming suggestion for keeping track of various folders containing my images that I’m going to send to the Copyright Office. A folder named U0801 would be a folder of unpublished images, created in 2008 and it is the first such folder for that year. A folder named P0805 contains published photographs, published in 2008, and it is the 5th such folder (registration) that I have for the year. John explains everything about this in much greater detail in his book. Likewise, I follow his examples and forms provided with his book for filing with the Copyright office. I now do some of my registrations via the Copyright Office’s online registration system — it’s fairly easy to use and saves $10 on the registration fees.
Mike Scott’s one handed rebound
Wow. The Hoos’ finally dispatched of an opponent the way many fans expect them to do with every team they play. Virginia, led by Mike Scott’s game high 17 points and 15 boards (a one-handed version is pictured above), dispatched of the Hampton University Pirates 74-48 at the John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville, VA on December 23, 2008. For me, this was a particularly fun game, given the proximity to the Christmas holiday — the arena was largely empty, the usual radio interference problems with my remotes was non-existent, and everyone seemed to be in a good mood.
More images from this game…
Happy Holidays to all!
Mount Wellington, Tasmania
After my ear drum ruptured in the middle of a Virgin Blue flight from Brisbane to Cairns, ruining a good part of my trip, it had been several days since I went out and actually felt like shooting again. I finally felt good enough to take a short trip to Mount Wellington in Tasmania. Rising above 4,100 feet from the Derwent River and the town of Hobart, the views are stunning, albeit often cloud filled. This is my favorite shot from the trip up — showing the enclosed observation deck, surrounding hills and mountains, the river, harbor and town below. While there were certainly tons of people up top, I felt very much removed from the rest of the world.
An interesting unanticipated challenge was that directly behind me was a very large (and apparently powerful) transmission tower that interfered with the communication between my camera body and the lens. The view finder kept going dark like I pressed the DoF button — and then random never-before-seen error messages on the LCD of my 1Ds… pretty freaky.
