I hope you, fearless wanderer of my website, are ready for the least organized thoughts about volleyball photography that have ever been dropped unceremoniously onto the world. The entire point of this blog of sorts, is to help the photographers who come after me seeking help to find some. My main focus is on how to understand settings and why to pick them a certain way, and also to remind the young or new photographer that you don't always need the latest and greatest to start, or even succeed. That said, let the musings come forth.
On Settings:
Settings suck. I absolutely hate trying pick and sort out what settings will not only get me the brightness and color I want, but also the other photographic components I need to get a dynamic photo. I'll be using the picture to the left as my example for this glorified rambling, starting with finding a vision to base your setting from. For me, that usually means high emotion, or a moment of high action in a game, on a climb, or in whatever context I'm photographing. Even with a building, it's not just what looks good, but what do I feel looking at it, and what do I want everyone else to feel about it. In the photo to the left, I saw a huge emotion after scoring a point, and throughout the entirety of this volleyball game I was prioritizing capturing players in more isolation from their background. When it comes to settings, I was leaning into an aperture of f/2.8 to blur the background and pull the players on the court away from the bright red of the stands behind them. Because f/2.8 is crazy wide open, I was also running 3200 ISO and a high shutter speed of 1/1250th of a second to prevent overexposure. This is not going to be the same across all cameras, and my usual white balance setting (outdoor always) does not work for everyone either, but the general idea of setting up with a wide aperture, lower ISO, and higher shutter speed should be a solid starting point for trying to isolate a subject in this context. My editing presets, tuned over time as they are, tend to explicitly leave the white balance alone, but that mostly leaves the option to pull warmer or cooler as needed from an artistic perspective.
On editing:
Do not be "that guy" from Instagram who uses 800 masks and so much color correction and Photoshop that your photos don't look natural anymore. Everything I upload here is clearly recognizable from the raw, and more importantly, it's true to how the moment looked when I captured it. Taking a photo and then editing it beyond recognition is its own art, but I wouldn't label that photography as much as digital design. Drawing out what you saw in the moment is different than trying to create an image that is in some way more than what you saw, and being conscious of what you want to do about that is key to the editing process. No matter what speaks to you, learn and follow that vision. Everyone has an artistic instinct and letting that guide you more than an internet photographer with a thousand times your experience is always the best way. Find your niche and style and stick to it, there are other people who will find you and feel spoken to because you were authentically yourself, and that will always be more important than being "the most main stream".
- Andrew (currently with 2 games worth of volleyball photo experience)
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