NoVa Roller Derby May 14, 2016: SuperNoVas vs York City Derby Dames

NoVa Roller Derby SuperNoVas vs York City Derby Dames Album

...Or you can just scroll down!

I'm hoping this set shows the additional effort I'm putting into pushing the quality up higher. In particular, the cropping, white balance, and sharpening have gotten more attention than in the past, where the entire batch was given to Imagemagick with a single set of parameters and nature took it's due course.

It's clear the camera's being flogged pretty hard when close cropped versions are examined, and the sharpening and white balance fixes just make it worse, and mottling of dark colors becomes pretty obvious... the tones in the shadows under the rim of helmets all look a little off.

I noticed I'm dutching the camera at times. generally to bring the horizontal axis parallel to the skaters attack angle with the ground, but other times completely arbitrarily. Part of this is likely that the depth compression at long focal lengths makes finding true horizontal hard, part of it is trying to make the skater look right in the frame, thereby making the crowd look funny, and part of it is just my own laziness and hurry to mash the shutter button.

NoVa Derby Good vs. Evil Mixer June 10, 2016

I am desperately behind posting about anything, and am really desperately behind posting photos of derby.

You'll have to suffer.

I bought 16 Eneloop batteries with the sole purpose of keeping the flashes hot for the length of a double header. I now have over 30 low discharge AAs of various vintages, and I've marked them so I can keep them properly paired. With 5 AA Eneloop batteries, the SB-800 can crank out around 500-600 half power shots.

When I was working weddings with regularity, I had a stack of normal NiMH batteries that I would charge and use, and the discharge profile wasn't too insufferable. However, those batteries gave up the ghost last fall and wouldn't even power the Cactus remotes for any length of time. Thus, combined with the pain that a broken leg brings to mobility, I left artificial light work sit on the back burner.

But things are better now.

This year I vowed to up the quality of the photos of derby I'm taking. This means being more choosy about the photos and putting my hands on each one before I produce it, though that functionally means that everything is getting cropped a bit. I hope you like 1:1 aspect ratio, because I do. It looks great on every device and it captures the eye. I'm also playing with black and white because I can.

Even after 4 years, getting to composition nailed is still a struggle. It turns out that if you nail 25% of a skater; just their head and shoulders, the photos can be as compelling as a full body slam, though the meanings between the photos are often different. Getting a solid focus lock to obtain a crisp face.


I'm still flogging my D200, now well past 100,000 shutter actuations. The quality in available light in the arena is poor enough that folks who try to use the photos in prints turn up their nose in favor of cameras made this decade. They look ok on small screens and in general on the web. At ISO 400 with a flash, the age isn't much of a limiting factor.

The shutter sync speed is, however. If I want to push down the dark yellow background, I'm going to either need to invest in more flash power.