[Mauriceg]

May 17, 2015 at 3:47 pm

Derek, am always delighted to give advice. I appreciate just how much work you have to put into to be able to produce consistently good images. Give me a shout if you want more help on this area!

[Mauriceg]

May 17, 2015 at 9:04 am

A couple of very quick thoughts. Your exif data on Flikr seems to indicate that you shot these photos at 1/1600, F8 and at 100mm. For sports photography you need to be looking more at 1/2500, F4 and as long as your lens will go – 300mm in your case. Its all about freezing the action, catching the emotion and cropping the shot so its all about the action. Let me know if you want to see some examples of what I’m talking about…

[Mauriceg]

April 1, 2015 at 10:34 pm

Not bad, but you need to work on your cropping and straightening. For example, for the second image I would have cropped tight around your son’s group and left out the red haired kid on the right. The third one slants off to the left and would be more dramatic if it was straightened – your son would be at a more acute angle. What gear are you shooting with and what settings are you using?

[Mauriceg]

March 19, 2015 at 8:57 pm

Mark – I’m a Canon shooter and shoot my sports in RAW. I have my workflow down to a tee now and it doesn’t take much longer this way than shooting jpeg’s, plus I get a better image (imho!) I’ve played around with Lightroom, Adobe Camera RAW but have always come back to Canon’s DPP product. It seems to get better images from .cr2 files than Lightroom… Also the new version, DPP 4.0 has pretty much all the functionality of LR built in, is free, and produces great images. The image of the hurler was WB corrected, sharpened to 7 and had NR pushed to 5. Hopefully that helps…

[Mauriceg]

March 14, 2015 at 8:45 am

ISO is one of those things that people are scared to push. Sometimes you have to push it and accept a bit of noise. This shot is F2.8, 1/800 and ISO12800. The quality is more than acceptable for newspapers and printing up to say, A4.

[Mauriceg]

February 28, 2014 at 12:04 pm

Appreciate that Paul, here’s hoping the weather this weekend holds up!

[Mauriceg]

February 8, 2014 at 9:23 pm

Appreciate that Peter! Delighted with the sale, nice to get things completed smoothly.

[Mauriceg]

February 1, 2014 at 9:47 pm

Peter – where are you based?

[Mauriceg]

December 20, 2013 at 11:45 am

Nice work! I agree about the noise, I’d be thinking first about stopping the action (at least 1/800sec, preferably 1/1000sec) and then looking at the noise afterwards. Especially like the last shot…

[Mauriceg]

November 21, 2013 at 4:36 pm

Mark wrote:

Great action captured Gortan !.

Maurice, totally agree – its all about practice. The local club will love the photos, especially if underage the kids will love them and all the while honing the skills necessary to shoot sport well.

Agreed. We run a MiniLeagues program in June and I took over 5000 photos in that month alone. What I was taking at the end of the month was light years ahead of the start of the month. And yes, the kids love getting their photos taken, they’re all little poseurs these days ;-)

[Mauriceg]

November 21, 2013 at 3:04 pm

Gortan60 wrote:

Mauriceg wrote:

Nice work! I’ve been using the Sigma 70-200 for a while now for sports work and I have to say, its a really great lens. I’m probably going to get the 120-300mm in the new year, the reviews for that have been great. The days of poor quality Sigma lenses are long gone… Here’s an example of one the shots I got a while back up in Parnell Park:

Nice one alright! I personally love shots that capture players off the ground, think it adds a bit of ‘ooomph’. Wouldn’t mind the 120-300 myself but for now I’m happy with the 70-200, very sharp when used right.

Certainly does, can’t beat a bit of aerial action. And to all those looking to take more sports photography, get yourself involved with your local club and start putting yourself forward. Once they get to know what you can do, you’ll get plenty of opportunity to take photos. Nothing beats practice…

[Mauriceg]

November 14, 2013 at 2:19 pm

Nice work! I’ve been using the Sigma 70-200 for a while now for sports work and I have to say, its a really great lens. I’m probably going to get the 120-300mm in the new year, the reviews for that have been great. The days of poor quality Sigma lenses are long gone… Here’s an example of one the shots I got a while back up in Parnell Park:

[Mauriceg]

November 16, 2012 at 3:34 pm

Isabella – nope, it just tells you when and from which direction sunset, sunrise. moonset and moonrise will be. Doesn’t handle weather I’m afraid but does handle time of year etc. Its free for the PC version and is well worth having. I only get limited time to shoot photos (damn you real life!) so I like to make sure I get where I’m shooting at the right time. For Johnstown Castle I checked it out on Google maps first to get an idea of the landscape, direction of lake etc and used the Photographers Ephemeris to work out when the sun would be shining along the lake and into the castle. Turned out to be just before sunset (the builders probably did that on purpose) which worked out really well. And as luck had it, it was a lovely still day which gave great reflections…

[Mauriceg]

November 16, 2012 at 3:28 pm

Dan – looks much better with the crop. And nice website – that a skin on top of Smugmug?

[Mauriceg]

November 15, 2012 at 2:56 pm

I see what Vee is saying about a painting and if anything, the clouds reinforce that impression. Could you try it with a smaller frame maybe – I think the thick black takes away from a tad. Otherwise, great shot.