Soccer season has started up for the kids again. This also being the first season for our 3 year old Colin.

This is my first season now shooting with some Canon “L” glass, my 70-200 f2.8, it does scream “hello I’m an expensive Canon, lense”. For all other previous years I’d been shooting with the very respectable 75-300mm Canon lense. To compensate for the shortcoming on reach with my new lense I have a 1.4 teleconvertor mounted to get me close on the long end (270mm).

For the shots posted I was shooting as high a shutter speed as possible (naturally) with the lowest ISO I could get away with. In the end, due to a setting sun I ended up settling on ISO of 1000, did some unsharp mask (for sharpening) in photoshop, and then ran a noise filter to clean up the noise (graininess).

On to the soccer. Noah played forward in the first half and was in goal for the second half. So obviously these shots are out of sequence. It just so happens I didn’t get any fantastic first half shots, and I generally like to put my best stuff up first… kinda like watching Saturday Nigh Live, all their best stuff is at the beginning while the less memorable skits are always left for the second half of the show.

In his opening game (due to a scheduling mix-up he missed the actual first game) and he scored the first goal. What a great moment, although not in a great position for capturing of this moment, I was atleast able to get the sequence.

I was pretty happy with his goaltending pics. A lucky composition and some good timing helped me get this first shot. Although the image did not come out razor sharp, I was still able to sharpen a bit in photoshop. 

The end of this match up ended in a 4-4 draw, or a tie as it is also know. There wasn’t an overtime, or a shootout. Just a fantastic game that deservedly ended in a draw.

I have 2 more kids also in soccer to help me fill up this blog through the summer. So check back for some more pictures of the kids enjoying summer soccer.

So my Dad, bless his soul, is about as anti-digital as one can get when it comes to photography…. well I guess I could extend that to pretty much anything else digital as well, including computers. So the likelihood of him even reading this is slim at best.

The other day he accidentily left his top loading automatic fuji film camera on the top of his car as he drove off… and guess what, it became destroyed after another passing motorist took aim for his now shuttering camera lying in the middle of the road. My father will tell you it was a premeditated act done by a soul-less individual.

I do have to admit however, that even for a point and shoot camera, I think the results he was getting from that little camera were quite good. The one thing that really stood out for me was the colour was always spot-on. The focus decent when printed at 4×6 size. The review window on the back of the camera, non-existent.

With the price of a decent point and shoot dropping like a rock you would think that this would be the perfect opportunity to change formats, but this is my dad we’re talking about. A couple days later he calls me up, full of excitement, to tell me about his new purchase, er, I mean, purchases. You see, he started looking for a replacement “film” camera at a couple of the local pawn shops but had no luck. So while driving pass a thrift shop he thought he should check it out.

They had three “film” cameras, and after some heavy duty negotiating he walked out of there with $7.50 less in his wallet…. Why three, cause you never know if a serial “film” camera killer might be in the area.

The next day he was in Port Huron just looking around, doing some cross border shopping, when he ended up in another pawn shop, and unbelievably enough, they too had a “film” type camera. So he bought that too! Again, if the killer strikes again, what are the chances he’ll take out all 4 cameras. I guess pretty good if he leaves all 4 cameras on top of his car!

So in the end, is it so wrong to still be in a dying format, I wonder if the camera killer also works for the film companies who are no longer going to make film. Admittedly, for me, the results from film, even on a point and shoot, still produces a quality image… and if he’s happy with it, why not. I know that in my case, my recently purchased canon “L” glass could have bought roughly 500 of his thrift shop cameras. If I ever leave that on the roof of my car, well I shutter (insert groan here) at the thought.

This is something I’ve been exploring lately as I really wasn’t sure what the differences were. Even with all the info that is out there on the subject I’m still a little confused as to where someone would actually use the AI FOCUS mode. I have to admit that I had not (up until recently) experimented with any mode other than ONE SHOT.

Shooting sports in ONE SHOT mode therefore becomes a little tricky and you really have to be quick when it comes to refocusing the subject as they are moving (ie. pressing the shutter half down). Obviously this becomes tedious, but the payoff is a fairly reliable chance of getting an in focus moment, dependant of course on many other factors as well.

The problem starts to come into play when you are shooting wide open (ie. 2.8 or lower) and now your shallow depth of field makes prefocussing a bit of an issue especially if your subject moves towards or away from you the instant you decide to capture the moment. The best solution from all the information that I’ve scoured from the internet is that AI SERVO is the best bet. One caviet, this mode will only use the centre focus point for focusing…. which I figured is acceptable in a fast moving situation, but leaves very little room for creative composing during moments of inactivety that you may want to catch. I mean who wants to have to  switch back to ONE SHOT mode and then back to AI SERVO mode constantly.

And then I found there is a solution to this. A fairly well known one too! I wouldn’t exactly call it a secret because it is published in the canon manual, but really who reads that crap anyway, kidding. So what I found is that if you venture into the menu system and down to the ‘custom functions’ area (C.fn), you go to the 4th selection and you choose the first option (ie. C.fn 4-1), you’re camera will now focus by means of the * button on the back of your camera. The exposure setting is taken care of by the shutter release button being held down half way but will NOT focus any longer.

Initially I thought, ya, so what. Don’t see the advantage…. well, here is where this really works well. Say I’m shooting soccer or any other situation where there is a lot of movement, and typically you’ll find a lot of times there isn’t a lot of action, but when the action is there you need to be ready for it.

Now using this technique, that is being in AI SERVO mode and also having your ‘custom function’ number 4 set with option 1, you’ll be using the * button to focus on the action as it happens, you can keep shooting as the action starts moving toward or away from you confident that you will have more keepers than deleters. 

If you see something that’s happening statically while there is no play going on but you know you want to compose your image with the focal point placed off centre, you simply lock your subject with the centre focus point and the * button pushed down, release the * button and now you can recompose however you want knowing that your subject will be in focus (providing it or they don’t in any way of course).

So the jury is still out, but I’m liking it. My wife on the other hand may not like it and I suspect I’ll get a call on the cell phone the day she goes to use it and finds that it won’t focus. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Go ahead and give it a try, you might like what you find. Rob.

Wow, what a long title huh!? Anyway, I really, really, really like the WP-Simpleviewer plugin and have used Simpleviewer as a stand-alone application, so it was only natural that I would want to use it as part of this, my wordpress weblog for my photography website. The only problem I ran into, and I’d consider this to be a major one, was the image quality was very poor and I found that any of my images that had text in them in particular would render very poorly…and when you’re trying to promote yourself as a photographer, potential clients don’t want to see crap.

So, anyone else that stumbles across this and is looking for the solution, well it may not be what you want to hear, but this will give you the best quality image. For the most part, this solution is found here at the developers site click here for the RSS feed I subscribed to for more info.

In a nutshell, a mod that had an effect on quality, but for me, not enough was to change the change the code in wp-simpleviewer-admin.php in line 1183 from imagecopyresized to imagecopyresampled. In the end, my best quality results are accomplished by following these directions.

Really, the only thing I’m offering here is a workflow that helps me, especially since I had 7 galleries to convert back to a more decent offering of images. Basically, when you run the WP-simpleviewer plugin it creates a thumbnail folder (tn) and a picture folder (reg), which incidentally is where the generated images go.

1. So in my case I use my origional files on my laptop for the gallery I want to improve and place just those images in a temporary folder and use the Automate feature in Photoshop to create a web photo gallery, setting my image quality to 8 and image size to 450 pixels.
2. Once the gallery is created I go to the images folder of my newly created webgallery using an FTP program and transfer the photoshop created images into the ‘reg’ folder of the gallery that I’m trying to improve the quality of. I agree to replacing the old images with the new, go back to my weblog page, hold the ’shift’ key with the refresh selection (Internet Explorer) to clear out the cache and test my gallery…. if everything was done correctly, you should notice a distinct difference between your old images from your new.
3. After I’ve verified everything is working for that particular gallery, I go to the temporary directory I created to store the images from the gallery I wanted to create a gallery photo page from via photoshop and simply delete all those images. I then go to the other temporary web directory I used for photoshops destination folder and delete all the content out of there.
4. Now I’m ready to complete the whole process all over again. The nice thing about this process is that the Automate feature will now use my newly created default directories and I don’t have to go searching for the directory I want to recreate.

As an example of my folder naming structure this is what I use:

My gallery source folder on my laptop: galleryTemp

My gallery destination folder on my laptop: webTemp

Good luck to ya if you’re into using this gallery. Esthetically this is one of the best looking galleries, especially when your into clean and simple, and lightweight is great as well.

Rob