[Kombisaurus]

The 2006 Commonwealth Water Polo Championships were held here in Perth at Challenge Stadium all last week.
Water Polo isn't a sport in the Commonwealth Games, so this tournament was created to make up for this fact.
There were eight countries competing at this championships - Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore, the Republic of South Africa, England, Scotland (women's only) and Wales (men's only).

The official website for the event is http://www.waterpolochamps.com
There you can find all the results and info and stuff that I won't go on about here. But to cut a long story short, in both men's and women's events it was Australia gold, Canada silver, and New Zealand bronze.

Ok... now onto the photos. These are a few of my favourite action shots from the 7500+ shots I took during the week.
I don't pretend that these shots are unbiased or provide a well balanced view of the championships. I would've liked to have shot more variety than I did, but we had a total of 8 West Australian athletes in both men's and women's Australian teams and part of my reason for getting a media pass and being there was to get good shots of these particular athletes.


1. South Africa's Ettienne Le Roux lines up for a shot against Australia in the heats.


2. Australia's Sam McGregor breaks free from his South African opponent sparking an incident which ended with the South African coach being given a red card for arguing with the umpire.


3. Australian goalie Alicia McCormack hits the water after making a save in the women's heat against Canada.


4. Local girl Gemma Beadsworth scores for Australia against Singapore.


5. Another local girl Gemma Hadley loses her cap as she scores for Australia against Canada in the women's Gold Medal final.


6. Australian goalie James Stanton (another local WA athlete) makes a save against Canada in the men's Gold Medal final.

[shuttertalk]

Mate, you never cease to impress me! Congratulations on a job extremely well done - you really have a knack for capturing the expressions of feelings of the moment. I think these are definitely of professional sports journalism calibre...

It's hard to pick a favourite - they're all good, but I think #1 stands out for me. The water is captured perfectly and I love how you can see the shooter? and the goalie in the background. You really get a sense of the anticipation in the shot.

#2 and #5 - great expressions...

#3 - an artistic shot... very nice

#6 - love the composition - absolutely beautiful.


Were you allowed to roam around the pool, or were you confined to a particular area? I wish I could get a press pass too! I suppose having a nice long white lens helps too!

[byrt_001]

hi

greeeaaattt stuff greeeaattt models(uuhmm) sportman-sportwoman.

my favorite is the first one as i really like the water following the ball and hand as well the muscle well difine on his back. you never think this is a hard sport.

could t be possible to share some of your settings? shutterspeed? flash?

thanks

christian

[Russt]

Kombi,

all of these are just fantastic...........I'll go with #1 if I had to choose.

I don't know what your doing now but I would put you on as a spots photog no worries!!!!!

7500 shots man thats a lot of shots...........what would you consider your hit and miss percentage??

again well done

[Petographer]

Good doccumentation and fantastic images Adrian. Very well done. What processing did you put these through? I know you posted the lens and settings used before but I'd like to read more on what you shot these with and the processing.

[Kombisaurus]

Thanks for your kind comments

My settings?
Well, I tried to mix things at various times to try things out, but time and time again for the indoor games (which was almost all of them) I kept coming back to this combination:

Lens: Canon EF 135mm f/2.0 (no teleconverter)
Flash: None
ISO: 800
Shooting Mode: Av (Aperture Priority)
Aperture: f/2.0 (I'd sometimes sit on f/2.5 or f/2.8 during the day when there was a bit more light)
Shutter speed: 1/1000th sec (anything slower than 1/750th will make it VERY difficult to freeze motion in this game)

The indoor stadium had pretty poor window lighting, so the difference between shooting night and day was only about 1 stop of light. But for an indoor stadium it did have good artificial lighting. It was used to host the World Swimming Championships in 1998 among other things, and they had the "TV lights" on nearly the whole time.
Having said that, you would still need an f/2.8 lens at 1600 ISO to have a chance of freezing the action at night time. In my case I preferred to shoot f/2.0 at 800 ISO, giving up some DOF in favour of sharper, less noisy pictures.

The lights were mainly on one side of the stadium however, and the sunlight mainly came in through the other side of the stadium. That meant that during the day the lighting was fairly even from both sides (shot 6), but at night it was predominantly on one side (look at the goalie's face in shot 1).
Shots taken from the same side as the lights (shots 2 and 5) tended to look fairly consistent from day to night and produce what you'd expect for this kind of situation, but when I went around to the other side of the pool during the evening and then shot towards the light I was able to get those backlit silhoetted shots of 3 and 4. With the shots above I would intentionally set myself up and stay looking at an area of the pool in front of goals that had the light reflecting on it nicely, and then wait for the action to pass through that spot.
Because the goalie didn't move much, another trick I used was manually focusing through the net on the spot where they would most likely be to take a save. and then I didn't need to worry about autofocus when the decisive moment came - I could concentrate on composition knowing the goalie would probably be in focus (maybe, sometimes, perhaps).

Did I mention how much I love my 135mm f/2.0 lens?
It was absolutely in its element in a situation like this. I was a bit worried that it wasn't going to be as versatile or useful as, say, a 70-200 f/2.8L.. and for outdoor sports it probably wouldn't be... but it never ceased to blow me away all week. Beautiful beautiful images, fantastic colour and contrast, almost instant autofocus, and talk about sharp! It's scary sometimes!

There were other photographers there during the week using 70-200 f/2.8L's with/without a teleconverter, a 300 f/4L (for some outdoor games), a 300 f/2.8L IS which was used all week on a D60, and even a guy at the finals with a 1D Mk2 and a monster 400mm f/2.8L IS (yikes!).
And amongst it all, there I was... with my longest lens (a 70-200 f/4L) and teleconverter tucked away in my bag, shooting almost all my shots with my tiny, bare (and cheap compared to what was around me) little 135mm f/2.0L. ...and I was loving it! (although I did get the urge to stuff a pair of socks down my pants to help compensate for such a little lens )

While I would give my right arm to own some of the nice gear I saw floating around during the week, if I had to shoot this particular event again with only one lens, I wouldn't hesitate in choosing the 135 f/2L again. It was incredible how versatile it was.
The only lens I can think of that might come close to it for an event like this would be the legendary EF 200mm f/1.8L.... but that isn't really a practical option for me at the moment unless I win lotto.
Sure I ended up cropping many of my shots down from 8 to about 4 megapixels... but that's still fine to print at A4 which is as big as they are likely to ever need to go. It's easy to crop a wide shot down and "zoom in" on it, but you can't go the other way and invent detail that was outside the frame of the original shot.

As far as processing goes peto.. well I put a fair bit of effort into getting the colours right, and often then I still wasn't happy. Although the artificial lighting was good, it was still tough to get a really nice white balance... and ACR has a really bad habit of oversaturating the cyans compared to Canon's RAW converter... so although I tend to use ACR when converting the images, I found Canon's DPP was *much* better at reproducing accurate colours for the water. I hope they "fix" this in ACR - and I would almost consider it a bug it was that bad.
Apart from that, I'd do the usual bit of sharpening and noise reduction.. but the only non-standard thing I'd do would be to often slightly over-expose things and then add a tone-curve with a mask to bring the tones down again. The tone curve would dramatically darken mid-tones and shadows, and I'd use a soft transparent brush to paint the effect into the image, and then blur the mask using a gaussian blur, and then clean up any sharp edges I wanted in it.
I used to use this method to simply add vignettes to images, but now I tend to use it to "paint" subtle light and shadows and selectively add or remove local contrast to areas that need it. For example in shot #6 I've darkened the top right and bottom left corners to emphasize the strong diagonal line of the goalie's arm, draw attention towards the ball, and add a bit more of a dynamic element to the shot. In shot #1 I used it to put a bit more contrast into the water without upsetting the skin-tones too much. In #5 I darkened the top of the picture to emphasize the feeling of depth in the shot, provide more contrast against the ball, take a bit of attention away from the player looking on, plus it simply gives a pleasing colour to the water at the top of the shot.
Its quite a simple technique, but like most things its not so much what you do but how you do it. I try to use it to bring out different elements in different shots rather than reduce it to a cookie-cutter approach. But I think it does end up giving a bit of a similar "look" to a lot of my shots, for better or worse.

[Janika]

These are some real nice and professional looking shots, all I can say is Wow!
Did you know that Waterpolo World Champion is Hungary?! Of course not part of the Commonwealth games, but I love this sport. Thanx for sharing em!

[Zig]

Kombi ol' chap. Your skill is matched only by your extreme helpfulness in telling us how you dfid it.
All are darn good; the first and last however are so fine and rare that they would totally eclipse Jealousy herself...see: y'ave gone and got me all Shakespearean now!
You really do make these look effortless and uncontrived too in the postprocessing...and a big amen brother for you saying about the slight overexposure in the taking stage so as to hang onto detail. A showcase not just of very good photography but of the mastery of the strange particular behaviour of digi. I do find a world of textural difference between 800 and 1600 thus far; these have instilled in me a fair bit of confidence to perhaps step out more into allowing myself to use higher ASAs. May these images reap the rewards you deserve there mate.

[Petographer]

Thanks big time for the write up. I might just consider this lens. I've found that most of the dog shows I shoot at near my home are poorly lit and this lens might just be the ticket.