Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve primarily been covering football. That’s part of the nature of living in the Atlanta area, and more generally the south – high school and college football is the king of sports here.
With the seasons changing, winter sports are starting. Among those is Swimming and Diving. Greater Atlanta Christian has a beautiful swim center that opened last winter for one meet. This year, it will host several. Among the best features of this building is the light. It has some daylight (although not today due to the time of day) but also excellent artificial lights that have a nice soft, diffused output (bounced off the inside of the roof) with a nice consistent color temperature throughout the building. And a rarity in high school structures – it has enough light to shoot natural light at good shutter speeds. It really gives color a great punch.
One more note on lighting – it generally is not accepted to use flash or strobes at swimming. One of the signals for the start is strobe flash.
Diving is a difficult sport to shoot. At this event, only the 1 meter springboard was used, which means most of the divers’ didn’t achieve enough height to clear the background. Some did – which greatly improved the results.
Some strokes photograph better than others. Breast stroke is great to shoot. The key is getting the swimmer with the head fully out of the water and mouth opening to breathe. You can shoot from head on or the side.
Butterfly also photographs well – but only from the front. The best swimmers get high out of the water. You have to be careful not to clip hands and arms.
Swimming also gives a lot of time for off-action shots – like waiting on the start. I liked the repetition here with the second swimmer in the background.
There’s also a lot of downtime for the swimmers – which is a great opportunity for candids as they interact with teammates. I’ll often use my 300/2.8 for candids – it keeps me out of the interaction but allows for tight framing.
My favorite out of these is the second last picture. It almost looks like you can see the swimmers mind and all the turbines inside turning while she thinks about the upcoming race. Also, I like how there is total focus on the first girl in the picture, but you can still see the second girl in the background and she’s doing the same nervous/anxious thinking in the same picture. It’s like I can feel how important the race is.