Maples Pavilion,Stanford,Volleyball,women’s volleyball

Last night had a great time at the Stanford women vs. Washington State Women volleyball matches.  Thanks go to the anonymous donor  who provides on court seats to my Wife’s high school.

This time, I had some prior lessons to draw from….

• I set the camera to shutter speed priority and upped the speed, and later on upped the speed again to 1/500 which is not quite fast enough.
• I changed the autofocus setup to make it easier to track the ball.  (and I had to tweek that once as well)
• I brought a monopod with a Sidekick mount making it much less physically tiring to shoot.  This also made it somewhat easier to keep the camera on the ball.
• All of this meant that I had to jack up the ISO quite a bit, but it is worth it; otherwise you don’t get the shots.

That is the good news… the bad news is that every time I shot across court I picked up a section of the unlit bleachers as background and the camera tried to compensate resulting in a blown out ball and players…  So, the new lesson is to shoot on manual exposure so that the background doesn’t change the exposure.

This  time I let the continuous  shooting  take more than 3 frames.  This  too worked, however with ~900 exposures I threw away 50% in the first pass, and after further winnowing I’m down to about 50 frames.  This is a significant improvement compared to roughly 10 from last time.

Surprise, it comes back to basics, focus and exposure, and being adroit enough to determine what needs to be done on the fly rather than after the fact.