Tag: High School

High School Basketball – Pullman vs West Valley – Feb. 11, 2022

It’s been nearly four years since I shot a basketball game. I took my Canon 6D with my trusty 70-200 lens. I got a new f/1.2 30mm prime lens. I put that on the 70D. As I shot I noticed the 70D consistently produced images with more grain. My 6D is a newer body. I set both of them to around f/3.3 with a shutter speed of 1/800 and auto ISO. As I look through the photos I can tell which ones were from the 6D and which were from the 70D based on the grain.

Tonight’s game against West Valley high school was senior night. It also meant Pullman would win the leave championship with a victory. Throughout the game Pullman pretty much controlled everything. Shortly after the third quarter started West Valley made a bit of a run and made it close but it didn’t take Pullman long to start running away again.

Following the game I got a few shots of the players celebrating their league championship.

I am not expert at shooting basketball. It is challenging because it seems bright inside the gym unless you’re shooting photos. So I have to compromise on the f/stop and shutter speed to get the photo without too much noise.

On top of that I have no idea what I am doing when cropping the photos. Obviously, I am trying to tell a story. I re-cropped these photos a second time. In some cases I thought the facial expressions of the players were being missed due to all the extra information in the photo. I am happier with the second cropping. In some photos I left the full body to show the height of the jump or the other battle taking place. In other cases it is upper body to show the facial expressions.

I have a friend who loves black and white sports photos. I changed all the photos I chose for this collection into black and white photos. I chose several that I thought looked pretty cool and included them in this upload.

High School Football – Pullman vs Toppenish – Sept. 10, 2021

Friday was a big day for me as a photographer. I started with doing photos at Chief Jim Krouse’s funeral. He died in the line of duty fighting a wildland fire near Colfax.

That evening I was in Pullman to shoot the first game of the 2021 football season. Pullman had a tough time playing against Toppenish High School. Toppenish has a top-ten wide receiver who had more than 200 yards receiving. Congratulations to that young man, Jason Grant.

Pullman got out to an early lead scoring their only touchdown while the score was zeros. After that it was all Toppenish. In fact, as I was going through my photos I found many more showed Toppenish in the favorable light. I was able to pick around 35 photos to display. I had more than 1,000 photos to choose from.

The way I started to shoot photos last year, with the camera on high resolution JPG and no RAW increased the number of photos I take by almost 100%. I also like my other settings, such as Auto ISO, which have helped me get high quality photos, overall. I went into more depth in a previous post. Unless I learn something better I think I will be keeping the settings.

Due to the weather it was a light misty-rain when I arrived, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get photos. As it turned out there was no rain to speak of once kick-off happened. But due to the worry about the rain I only had one camera with me. These all were shot with the Canon 6D with the Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8 lens.

High School Football – Pullman vs Rogers – Apr. 9, 2021

This evening Pullman High School took on Rogers High School from Spokane at Hobbs Field at Pullman High School. It was senior night and I wanted to make sure I got photos of all the seniors. I wrote down all their numbers and checked them off when I got several photos. This photo set is a little larger than most because of the extra photos of the seniors. I also was able to get a photo of all the seniors after the game when one of the coaches was taking photos.

The game itself was pretty well controlled by Pullman the whole way. At half time Pullman had a 14-0 lead. Then in the second half Pullman scored three more times to win 35-0. It was a sweet way for the seniors to finish at home.

I used the same set-up I have been using this season with one change. I went from a 50mm prime lens on the 70D to a 18-135 zoom lens. This allowed me to do even better when there is a play that happens incredibly close to my location. Prior to the game I was doing some test shots of the team practicing. I found my back-up SD card I was using was not up to snuff. Although it is a higher end card it was slow when saving when I took a bunch of photos. So I changed it back to the primary SD card and from there forward there were no issues with just holding down my shutter button.

The seniors, according to the Pullman High School roster are:
Hyatt Utzman #2
Carson Coulter #8
Ryan Bickelhaupt #10
Justin Tran #15
Maxwell Wolsborn #19
Jason Tran #23
Mason Emerson #24
Joel Moore #30
Jace Wright-Druffel #44
Zackary Farnsworth #45
Tanner Richartz #53
Gabriel Westensee #54
Kyle Volk #58
Kaleb Wilke #68

High School Football – Pullman vs West Valley – Mar. 12, 2021

The Friday Night Lights were illuminating Martin Stadium as the Pullman High Greyhounds battled the West Valley High School Eagles. The kick off was at seven o’clock in the evening and the air was brisk.

Pullman scored first but missed the extra point as the ball bounced off the left upright. With a bit of a back and forth battle the Eagles took a lead late into the 4th quarter. The Greyhounds had two chances late in the game but couldn’t get a sustained drive.

Today I used the Canon 6D body with the Canon EF 70-200 f/2.8 as my primary camera. I used the Canon 70D body with a 50mm f/1.4 prime lens as the secondary camera. Just like the last football game I choose to use Auto for the ISO setting and high resolution JPEG-only shooting.

Both of these settings are money. I found a couple times where I was able to just keep the photos flying. With the RAW+JPG setting I would run into buffering issues and I would sometimes miss shots. I have yet to run into a buffering issue using JPEG-only. The auto ISO setting has been helpful especially because I am not shooting in RAW mode. Without RAW I feel like my ability to do some of the necessary lighting adjustments would be hindered. With auto ISO I am getting well adjusted photos. So I am not missing the better editing qualities of the RAW photos.

Before the last game I had read some blogs about the camera settings for shooting football. I used the settings and have been very happy with the results, as I mentioned last week. One of the other things that I read about which I didn’t mention last week was getting the player’s eyes in the photos. Last game, after looking at the photos I really noticed it added a dimension to be able to see the eyes of the player.

In today’s shoot and with the photos I chose, many of them included the eyes. Because I liked how it added to the photos I adjusted my shooting this week. I decided to try to set up more shots were I would get the face of the player and see what they were looking at during the play. I still have photos from other angles but I had more this week from the front rather than the back of the action. Martin Stadium has great lighting so the eyes really show. I wonder how well this works when the field lighting isn’t as good.

One of the other things I have done for a long time is trying to recognize players prior to the snap as well as including the linemen. The linemen do the heavy lifting but don’t always get the recognition. I’ll admit that the action is where the football is and that will never change. But I will always try to get some shots with the linemen doing the grunt work.

The other thing I try to do is get some shots of players on the field of action. When I play sports and I come across a photo of me on the field ready for some action it is pretty cool. Knowing that in a high school setting there isn’t hundreds of cameras pointed at the action, there are many guys on the field who probably don’t get to see a shot of them lined-up and ready for action. I try to include such photos in hope the players will stumble on the shot and download it for themselves.

I do, internally, root for the Greyhounds to win. I try to remain neutral in appearance but I love Pullman victories. That said, when shooting a game I am there to get all the action, even if it is sometimes not a good play for Pullman. I don’t post a lot of them but I will post them for the same reason I mentioned in the previous paragraph.