First Images With Canon 5D Mark IV

This weekend I tested out my new Canon 5D Mark IV at a football game between SMU and Baylor in Waco, TX. I've owned a Canon 5D Mark III for several years now so there wasn't too much of an adjustment other than one new toggle switch on the back to change auto-focus settings. It was also fun playing with the new touch screen that allows you to tap to change settings, swipe through photos and pinch to zoom. Pretty cool stuff.

The new 30.4 MP sensor is awesome. For something like football it really allowed me to shoot action across the field and still be able to crop the photo down for a clean shot of the action that was pretty far away. With the new sensor is you really have to the focus properly on your subject. If you miss the focus it's really apparent and you might notice that in some of my photos. But when it hits it is really sharp even with the ancient 100-400L IS lens I was using. The focus was fast and it's just a matter of user error for missed shots.

Now I know the 5D4 isn't exactly made for sports photography but for me it's the perfect compromise. The only options for "sports photography" are the Canon 1DX Mark II (Just too expensive for me), the Canon 1DX (Too old for me -- I like Wifi and touch screen) and the Canon 7D Mark II (Not impressed with the sensor, dynamic range or ISO abilities). The 5D4 comes in right in the middle with a fair price of $3500, similar auto-focusing system to the Canon 1DX Mark II, great sensor and 7 frames per second, which is one more FPS than I was getting on the 5D3. It's an all-around shooter and everything I'm looking for. 

One thing to keep in mind when looking at these photos is most of them are heavily cropped and even at an images size of 2000px these are still pretty damn sharp. I could've used a better lens but I just don't have one right now. (p.s. a couple of these were shot with my old 5D3)

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. 

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.