Volleyball Action and Portrait Photography Mashup
Among the team and individual photographs I completed last week for Prolink Atlanta Volleyball, I had some time to work with one of the fifteen year-old teams on some higher concept staged action photographs.
The concepts for these are still a work in progress and will be taken further in the future. My goals with the lighting was to help highlight the player as the subject, while reducing the background and improving the stop-action sharpness of the photographs.
High Flying Volleyball
The most exciting element of volleyball is the play at and above the net. When photographing Saturday’s matches between Greater Atlanta Christian and Henry County, and later Marietta’s the Walker School, my goal was to get tight isolation on the play at the net.
Saturday’s matches were all at Holy Innocents Episcopal School in Dunwoody. The gym has average lighting when photographing from from floor level, but when shooting down on the participants you almost double your light. As the faces are looking up and facing the lights directly, you no longer have a shadow falling on the face. This lets you increase your shutter speed and get better stop action.
When shooting volleyball, I use a combination of lenses – usually the 70-200 and 300/2.8. I spend a lot of time following individual players and waiting for the rhythm of the game to bring the ball their way. When it does, I’ll shoot a two or three shot burst to get the full range of action and capture a great face waiting for the ball.
Volleyball: Cross-Training for Photographers
I’m a big fan of using different sports to expand my photographic horizons and improve my skills. When you look at it in the broad view, there are a lot of things across sports that are very similar.
Consider a header in soccer. It’s photographically similar to a reception in football, and to a spike in volleyball. A fast moving ball that you are trying to predict where it is going. That judgment carries through to any sport you photograph.
High school volleyball is difficult to shoot because of the light levels in most gyms. Without extremely large aperture lenses (f1.8 or f2.0) it is difficult to get good stop action.
Thursday’s match at Wesleyan was picked for coverage because Wesleyan has a great field house, with a better than average lighting system and the advantage of being able to get above the floor to catch faces in action.
