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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
olympic photos that "pop"
Chris Large, Photographer
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Okotoks | AB | Canada | Posted: 12:30 AM on 02.19.10 |
->> Looking at a number of sites with Olympic photos - like this....
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/ or almost anything done by Donald Miralle
I was wondering what post work is being done on these shots to give them "pop"
Without starting whole big ethics debate again, I'm curious if there is a simple work flow that sports guys are using and how far can you go with out it turning into an ethics problem. High pass filters etc?
I know what I do with my work but it's a whole different subject matter and 99.99 % of my shots are delivered RAW to the studios for their post work.
Just wondering....
Chris |
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Rob Shook, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Rochester | NY | USA | Posted: 1:38 AM on 02.19.10 |
->> I think it's just well processed.
I shoot entirely in raw and process my files to yield a similar result to this.
Here's my process:
Exposure - pull up until highlight warnings start filling in, then go a little more (it's okay that it's too light)
Recovery - pull up until highlight warnings disappear
Blacks - adjust until shadow warnings go on, then go a bit further
Fill light - adjust until shadow warnings are gone
If too bright from exposure, but the balance is right, bring it down with brightness.
Then I usually bump the contrast a bit, then add clarity until it looks good (clarity adjusts the contrast of the midtones).
Finally, sharpening. I spend very little time outside of Adobe Camera Raw.
Is this ethical from a journalistic standpoint? I don't know, and considering I am a student making images for posters around campus, it's not something I have to worry about - yet. |
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Andy Bronson, Photographer
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Bellingham | WA | USA | Posted: 1:49 AM on 02.19.10 |
| ->> Our photog is using the D3s and the color is sooo much better than the D3. So, I suspect it's a bit of processing adn possibly the cameras. But I'd throw in the fact there's lots of good fill light, aka SNOW. |
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Wesley R. Bush, Photographer
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Nashville | TN | U.S. | Posted: 10:02 AM on 02.19.10 |
| ->> Even if I tried for three straight days using every Photoshop tool I could, my photos never turn out that good. But that's the difference between a professional (them) and a GWC (me). Thankfully there are still enough of (them) left to give (me) reason to keep shooting. |
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Chuck Liddy, Photographer
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Durham | NC | USA | Posted: 10:54 AM on 02.19.10 |
| ->> Most of the shots "pop" because of the nature of the light for Olympic sports, as Andy said.....you have giant fill light coming from the ground that would be ...snow or even the inside venues, ice. Plus for the most part there aren't a lot of distracting backgrounds....and probably the most important fact, as Wes stated...the Olympics have the best of the best shooters there. Just like the athletes, they aren't amateurs, they are the best in the business, that's why their respective agencies spent the thousands of dollars to send them there. to make photos that "pop". |
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Nate Ryan, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Northfield | MN | | Posted: 11:17 AM on 02.19.10 |
| ->> On the Denver Post blog, there is a great fish-eye picture of the halfpipe event (Here: http://tinyurl.com/ydlfp46) Am I right to guess that this was probably a remote set-up? Any idea what the camera might mount to? |
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Lee Weissman, Photographer
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XXXXX | NY | USA | Posted: 11:41 AM on 02.19.10 |
| ->> Great pics...except I might not be too happy if a guy was in the bathroom with a camera behind me while I am at the urinal....but then again I probably wouldn't be at the urinal with my countries flag on my shoulders.... |
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Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
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Boise | ID | US | Posted: 12:20 PM on 02.19.10 |
->> Chris-
There's really not any post done on those. It's mostly just a matter of having your WB and exposure set properly and looking for good light.
With some of the older cameras you have to bump up the saturation a bit to bring it back to how it should be, but not so much with the current generation. |
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Bob Ford, Photographer
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Lehighton | Pa | USA | Posted: 12:23 PM on 02.19.10 |
| ->> Israel, just curious, how do you know that there wasn't any post done to those photos? |
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Louis Lopez, Photographer
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Fontana | CA | USA | Posted: 12:48 AM on 02.20.10 |
->> Are you kidding me?, if they are out in the public view almost every photo has had something done to it, sharpening, contrast resized, saturation, levels etc..
Almost all the wires have actions the photographers run on the images before they transmit, you ever step foot in a photo workroom and you won't say that anymore. |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 7:53 AM on 02.20.10 |
->> Pop
When working big events, few photographers work alone. They are usually a part of a team that works together to capture these wonderful images and get them out in a timely manner. Only one name is in the byline, but lots of other skilled individuals provide invaluable assistance to make it all possible.
When I have worked sports for AP, their post workflow consisted of a 4-step process, usually done primarily by four people sitting side-by-side at separate workstations. The first station is ingest. Ingest is done with Photomechanic. Cards are received from runners in envelopes and loaded onto a large shared disk farm using parallel card readers. Initial photo credit is applied at this step. If a photographer has an image they know is important, they flag it on the envelope and the ingest person puts it into a high priority queue for the next person in the process.
The next step is selection. An editor looks at a set of incoming folders and picks which photos will go onto the wire. More times than not this person will work with a couple of other folks who have intimate knowledge of the event and can help identify key moments. Cropping is usually done at this point, although sometimes that is left for the next step. Selects are moved into a special folder and passed along to the next person in the chain.
The third step is toning. A person opens up each image in photoshop, applies tonal correction (usually contrast and tone curves), and crops the photo if it hasn't already been done. Images are resized to the standard pixel limits used for transmission and saved for the next station.
The last step is captioning and transmit. Again with collaboration from others, captions are written for each image. This is tricky and must be done right. Using media guides, notes from the shooters, and folks hanging around in the edit area who know the sport intimately, people and places are identified and captions written in standard wire service format. Once captioning is done, the images are loaded into a transmit queue where they are sent to NYC for distribution.
The people who do this process are very, very good, and frequently they are photographers themselves. The whole process goes a lot quicker than you might think. I've seen key images go through the 4-step process in less than 30 seconds.
For larger organizations and wire services, multiple live shooters work together covering different angles of an event. With big matches you will have one or two guys who do nothing but remotes. Unlike the lone wolf shooter who has to play the percentages and pick one high-probability location and stay there while balancing shooting time with tone/caption/transmit, a team can divide up the territory and take their time. This provides a lot of freedom to take risks because if one angle or low-probability shot doesn't work, someone else in the team will have coverage.
Assistants are also very important. Card runners, remote assistants, folks who help out with identification and capturing, etc. All uncredited, all essential.
None of this takes ANYTHING away from the skill of the photographers. In fact, it takes a special type of shooter to work in this environment. Each photographer on the team has to bring their part of it all together - angle choice, gear selection, scheduling, timing, execution - all into one single moment of brilliance. The photographers have resources, but they alone have to make it all work together. Not everyone can do that. You have to start with amazing vision and creative talent. But you also have to add equal doses of management, organization and personality to make all happen. |
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Michael Fischer, Photographer
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Spencer | Ia | USA | Posted: 8:50 AM on 02.20.10 |
| ->> Great post, David. |
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Darren Whitley, Photographer
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Northwest Missouri | MO | USA | Posted: 11:55 AM on 02.20.10 |
->> Use fill light sparingly. A reasonable amount of black is desirable in a photograph. Even a reasonable amount of blown highlight isn't a totally bad thing. Just look where the light is coming from. IMHO, rim light should be blown out.
Adding too much fill light or highlight recovery makes the photos look gray and unnatural. It's something I've begun to notice on wire images, but not everyone is abusing those adjustments. |
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Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
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Boise | ID | US | Posted: 9:15 PM on 02.20.10 |
->> ->> Israel, just curious, how do you know that there wasn't any post done to those photos?
I don't know for sure and didn't ask. If you're concerned that people photoshopped the images excessively and used other techniques which are more shady, you can ask them about it :D
I've taken plenty of photos that have similar qualities of light and saturation. If you set your white balance and exposure correctly and do just normal workflow with brightness/contrast adjustments, along with looking for good light, you can get similar quality of color and "pop" |
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Bob Ford, Photographer
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Lehighton | Pa | USA | Posted: 4:31 PM on 02.21.10 |
| ->> I wasn't suggesting that any of the photos were Photoshopped excessively, I was more curious how you could make that statement when the photos were from different people from different agencies. |
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Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
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Boise | ID | US | Posted: 5:08 PM on 02.21.10 |
->> Bob-
I'm simply saying that at first glance it looks like someone just used their normal toning workflow, rather than spending a bunch of time doing post production work to the photos in photoshop.
It's really not a complex statement.
Now go pick on someone else :) |
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Alex Boyce, Photographer
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Florence | EU | Italy | Posted: 2:33 PM on 02.22.10 |
->> i recently at a freestyle motocross event had a task to do,
I had to shoot 3 shots of each athelete and there were 35 of them, in a studio light setup with a prop. I did a few test shots and set my lights, then i shot every single photo the same settings, took the card out put it into lightroom with preset import settings and profile settings that i figured out from the test shots, this meant that after shooting 35 people in turn after 20 mins 105 photos were ready and on the hard disk after export. and in the clients computer before they even realised.... lightroom is amazing for all of these pop effects if you know your settings and how to apply preset prepared filters that you setup before. |
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Paul Roberts, Photographer, Student/Intern
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Cheltenham | UK | England | Posted: 4:32 PM on 02.22.10 |
->> Not so sure about 'Looking for good light'. If I was on an advertising job then yes, but for general sports action as the Olympic images are you pretty much get whatever light you have.......much of it under floodlights.
WB/Exposure is a factor, but it should be, if you can't expose properly what are you doing as a photographer.
Having watched some of these guys work, I can tell you it is simply, normally anyway, just levels and curves in photoshop before they are wired.
Most of David's answer pretty much sums up the extent of the post production for the large agencies. |
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Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
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Boise | ID | US | Posted: 11:44 PM on 02.22.10 |
->> Paul-
Look at the photos on your SS page, then go look at the photos on the link Chris gave, specifically the ones that "pop".
The ones that "pop" were taken in quite different lighting from ones that "don't pop" on your SS page. |
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Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
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Boise | ID | US | Posted: 12:10 AM on 02.23.10 |
->> Maybe I should clarify that last statement a bit:
I needed someone to say that to me when I was in your shoes, but I wasted a bunch of time having to figure it out myself... I figure it's better to just come out and say it to other people and give them a step up that I didn't have. |
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Paul Roberts, Photographer, Student/Intern
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Cheltenham | UK | England | Posted: 2:51 AM on 02.23.10 |
->> Isreal,
Are you trying to say that......."the selection of Olympic images in the fist link have been selected to be shown because they are in good light and they pop There are thousands that don't pop but they aren't being shown."?
If thats the case I agree fully. But you implied that the Olympic photographers went 'looking for the light' which I know not to be the case. Thats all I was saying. |
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Rod Leland, Photographer, Assistant
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Lethbridge | AB | Canada | Posted: 4:17 AM on 02.23.10 |
->> Nate- Re: fisheye halfpipe remote-
I would put money on that being a "camera on a stick" setup. I saw a couple photogs holding cameras out over the edge of the shooting barrier on monopods with wide lenses, and triggering them with a short cable release or a wizard. It's a setup I use often to get a higher perspective as well. I believe there is a camera-on-a-stick funpix up near the top right now.
-Rod |
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Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
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Boise | ID | US | Posted: 10:27 AM on 02.23.10 |
->> > But you implied that the Olympic photographers went 'looking for the light' which I know not to be the case. Thats all I was saying.
I'm not implying that they went looking for good light; I'm explicitly saying it because it's my point.
A process that went through their heads: They thought, "I should look for good light so that my images will turn out better." Then they used their legs to move while using their eyes to "look for good light", then once they saw "good light" they thought "I should now take a photo using this good light that I have found." This can often just be a matter of moving a few feet from one's current position.
The result is their images standing out.
If you don't have the freedom to look for good light... it happens some days. Your images just don't "pop" - which is the topic of this thread - how to make your images "pop". Which requires looking for good light or creating it yourself. |
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Chris Peterson, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Columbia Falls | MT | USA | Posted: 10:56 AM on 02.24.10 |
->> Great Light (the light in Vancouver, on a sunny day in February will rarely suck, the sun doesn't get that high)
Great glass.
Great colors. Great photographers.
Look at that color! Most are all bright blues and reds, perfect for contrast on snow!
That's where your pop comes from. |
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