I have tried several times to capture our daughters during their swimming class. I usually get uninteresting pictures, with high color shifts, lots of blur due to low light conditions, or not enough details because I don’t go in the water to get closer…
Here are some very uninteresting and average shotsÂ
On the lucky days, paying more attention to the action and to my white balance, I would be able to catch pics like those belowÂ
Few months ago, Bob Stanton, a professional sports photographer who was a member of the Palo Alto Camera Club, presented some amazing sport images (view some of his work here). One of them was the training of an Olympic swimmer. Bob shared some of his techniques (some including underwater remotely controlled cameras). A simple idea that he described was to shoot from the end of the lane with the camera at water level (why didn’t I thought about it earlier?). When swimmers come out of the water, you can catch some interesting water flows around the face and the shoulders. Here is what it looks likeÂ
Nikon D50 • Nikkor 80-200 • 200 mm • 1/320s • f/5.6 • ev -1.66
11.24.2006 2:52PM
I edited the following elements in PhotoShop:
• Slight crop to remove the excess foreground
• Brightened the eyes
• Brightened the face
• Painted the background to remove the distracting details
• Darkened the outside to create a vignette effect
Here is a snapshot of the palette for the edits:
And here is the final picture:
I submitted an 12 x 18 print to the Palo Alto Camera Club competition in the Pictorial category on 12.06.06 and was awarded a 2nd place. Note that it was my first 12 x 18 print, which respects the original aspect ratio of the image taken by the camera. I usually print on 11 x 14, which requires cropping of the original shot, thus sometimes losing the original composition. Oh well…