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.
Keeping it Clean
One of the challenges with High School Sports, and especially indoors ones – is keeping the background of the photo clean. A clean background, with minimal distractions helps ensure the viewer will quickly focus on the subject of the photo. Photographers have several tools at their disposal to help ensure a clean background.
Greater Atlanta Christian School’s Long Forum is now playing host to their Volleyball squad as well. The Lady Spartans faced off against Wesleyan last week in what has traditionally been a great match up of two very good volleyball squads. It’s a superb facility for a number of reasons – but for purposes of keeping clean backgrounds, the black seating (when empty) does a great job of helping to isolate the athletes jersey colors from the background (black uniforms not withstanding as you will see.)
Personal Project Subjects Needed
While I’m investing a lot of time this fall on Football, I am always working to expand my skill set and find new photographic subjects.
The personal project I’m currently planning is a series of Editorial (Magazine) style portraits. Subjects needed include:
- A beach volleyball player capable of getting above the net
- An indoor volleyball athlete capable of getting above the net
- A high level Double Dutch team or group
- Soccer player who can perform a bicycle kick
- A high school level (9th grade/JV/Varsity) quarterback
- A wakeboarder who can get air and can perform various tricks
- A boxer or mixed martial arts fighter
Subjects will receive copies of the images and prints.
Please contact me if you meet any of the categories above. All photo shoots would start in the Atlanta metro area.
USA Volleyball – Off the Floor
As the USA Volleyball event was so large – four hundred participating teams over the two weeks it ran – I felt it was important to get off the floor where the games were played and photograph some of the down time for the teams.
Some time was spent practicing skills in the hallways above the Exhibition Hall. This is the one area of the Georgia World Congress Center with good natural light.
Championship Hair
It seemed to be popular to show your team spirit through your hair. Or at least I assume that was the reason behind it!
USA Volleyball Boys’ Junior Olympic Championships
The July 4th weekend was the middle of the Boys’ Junior Olympic Championships at the Georgia World Congress Center. The event had nearly four hundred teams from across the United States (with many teams from Hawaii and Puerto Rico as well).
Indoor Volleyball is always a difficult sport to photograph well. There are a number of challenges, starting with the dim lighting typical in most gyms. The Georgia World Congress Center is no better than these conditions, as it is more built for conventions and trade shows than athletic competition.
Variety of shot was one of my goals for this event. This meant changing viewpoints a lot.
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.
USA Volleyball Open National Championships
The week of May 24-June 1 USA Volleyball held their Open National Championships in Atlanta at the Georgia World Congress Center. The event, as its name implies, has a wide range of ages and athlete skills. Every age from college to 75+ was represented at the event.
The Georgia World Congress Center typically isn’t a sports venue. It’s a large convention center in downtown Atlanta. For this event, they set up thirty-five regulation sized volleyball courts on the convention floor. Most do not have any seating except for a row of folding chairs, and the lighting available is the same lighting used at your average trade show.
Volleyball is a fast moving sport at the higher levels, and needs a good shutter speed to stop the action. With so many games set up and operating at the same time, you also need to block out as much of the background as possible, so I selected Canon’s 200/f1.8 telephoto lens as my primary tool.
