Sunday, January 19, 2014

GWU Women’s Gymnastics: Pictures from the Lindsey Ferris meet




The perspective from the floor is probably the most popular sports photography view,  for both stills (left) and motion/pan blur (below).  













An alternative setup is across the floor, from an elevation, to catch the judges’ reactions at the Balance Beam, below. Modern sports arenas, such as GW’s Smith Center, usually offer many good viewing options. 





Color Balance is something I work on to make these pictures look their best, but if you want to skip a short demo about that technical subject, go to
for a gallery of 154 pictures featuring the GW team at the Lindsey Ferris meet.  




After composition, my biggest concern is color balance.  The Smith Center has a variable mix of light sources that include daylight, tungsten, fluorescent, and Mercury vapor lamps.  Each source has different (and changing) color temperatures.

Mixed lighting means it is very hard to balance the color in each image: some appear cool (blue), others are warm(yellow/red-ish), and some are a weird green or cyan (repulsive).  Color balance is very important in any paying job, but when I am shooting my daughter’s team for fun I compromise and concentrate on natural looking skin tones. 


A good example is this picture of Alex DeMoura

The original, on the left, looks very cool (skin tones and hair highlights).  I added slight amounts of yellow and green to the image on the right .  There are still problems in this correction, but overall I hope this is a noticeable improvement from the “as shot” original.  

If you don't see the change I am referring to, try looking at the blurry upper right corner of the corrected version.  The same area in the original is a different tone. 


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