The weekend before Thanksgiving I was in Garland, TX shooting the UIL high school volleyball state championships for 1st Photo Texas, who provides the official photos for UIL.
Most of these tournaments are structured the same – three days of competition, semi-finals on the first two days and finals on the third. They’re always a marathon of 12-15 hour days filled with high school athletes, jock jams, little sleep, food on the go, and lots of running.
I shoot action during the games, but that’s only about half of what needs to happen. I come in about and hour and a half to two hours before the first game every day to set up my lap top in the media area on the court, get my action equipment ready to go and set up a studio for team photos in a room down the hall. Yep, I do team photos too. Then I wait for the first team to arrive, about 60-90 min. before their game and take their photo.
Then I bounce back and forth all day between the court and the team photo room as teams arrive, while taking care of any extraneous photo needs for UIL, and catching a drink of water or a bite to eat when I can. Until the end of the day, when I tear everything down and go in search of food or a bed or both.
I shot 15 volleyball games over three days, and very few of them ended in the minimum 3 sets. It was definitely one of the longer tournaments I’ve covered.
Anyway, because of the amount of photos taken in that short time span, I shot .jpg files. I usually shoot only in RAW, but RAW files are larger, so they take up more memory card/hard drive space. I prefer to edit in RAW because the photos come out sharper, clearer, and the color and contrast is better. For these purposes, though, .jpgs were fine.
Alright, let’s get to the photos. Here are a few action shots.
The problem with shooting 15 games of the same sport in a row is that the shots start looking the same. I could predict what kind of image I’d get from every location I stood. While that’s sometimes a good thing, after game 3, it starts to get old.
The saving grace was the reaction shot. Every sport is pretty emotional, especially when there’s a state championship on the line. There’s no predicting what people will do when they’re emotional.
I have thousands of volleyball photos, but don’t worry, I won’t post all of them.
Next up is UIL high school football championships, next month at Cowboys Stadium. That’s my favorite tournament!
Equipment for action shots included:
– Nikon D700
– Nikon D300
– Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens
– Nikon 80-200mm f2.8 lens
– Nikon 200-400mm f4 lens
Equipment for group photos included:
– Nikon D700
– Nikon 24-70 f2.8 lens
– Alien Bees studio light
– Reflector studio umbrella
– Light stand
– UIL logo backdrop
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