SPORTS PACKED WEEKEND

What a weekend!!!  4 events in 1 weekend.  I’ve never had a weekend as full as this.  It was busy, hectic, exciting, and I had a blast.  Not only was it full of excitement it was also quite the variety of genres.  It started with a middle school talent show.  Then onto youth basketball and indoor color guard.  Finally it culminated with a youth cheerleading compentition.  Yep, I racked up some miles this weekend.

Friday: The Talent Show (Central Jersey). Unfortunately I am not allowed to share the pics from the talent here.  However, I really lucked out on this shoot.  Last year I shot the same talent show with last minute notice and only had my 18-105mm f3.5-5.6 lens with me.  The entire night I was shooting at f5.6.  The lighting at the talent show was extremely poor that night so I had to jack up my ISO to 3200.  The images were stisfactory at best.  Last weekend my friend lit up the stage with some kick-ass lighting.  Combine that with the fact that I was able to rent a 70-200mm f2.8 lens and I was now able to shoot at ISO1600.  What a difference those two factors made!

Saturday: Youth Basketball (South Jersey). I had a youth basketball game in the mid-afternoon and then an indoor color guard competition in the evening.  Oh yeah, they were 1.5 hours apart.  So I had o down time between events.  First up was basketball.  I learned a few lessons from the last time I shot youth basketball.  The biggest lesson I learned was not to shoot in Aperture priority mode when there is a lot of ambient light at the other end of the court.  In doing so the camera will expose for all of the light in the scene which ends up leaving the player under-exposed.  So this time I shot in Manual mode.  This way I was locked in my shutter speed the entire game.  I was able to shoot from under the basket which yielded better opportunities to get head on shots. Overall the shoot went well.  Although I didn’t come away with incredible shots I still learned from the experience.

Saturday Night: Indoor Color Guard (Central Jersey).  My wife works with an indoor color guard.  For those of you that do not know what indoor color guard is, here is my definition.  Men and women that dance,  jump, and spin while manipulating flags, rifles, and sabers.  It is intense, quick, and inspirational to watch.  With that said, I was tasked with photographing their performance.  The performance is one song.  So I had to nail as many shots as I could within 3-4 minutes, no pressure  No problem.  Set the 70-200 to f2.8, ISO1600, shutter speed 1/350th and fire away!  Unfortunately while working the 70-200 I am not able to get any wide shots.  Next time I will work on a way to remote mount another body with a wide angle.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!!! Cheer Competition (Eastern PA).  This was a blast.  Mainly because of where I was able to shoot from.  When the squad hit the floor for practice I walked up to the roped-off barrier and knelt down to start shooting.  At that point the photographer from the host team approached me.  I was thinking, ” oh boy here we go.”  Instead he told me that if I wanted I could setup on the floor IN FRONT of the ropes so that I could get the best shots possible.  I said, “really??”  He told me again to go ahead.  I couldn’t believe it.  So I sat there the entire show and go the prime shots that I wanted.  So I’m sending a big thank you to that guy.

This was by far the busiest photographing weekend I’ve ever had. I would do it again in a heartbeat!  The variety of sports combined with the different atmospheres made for such an amazing experience.  Weekends like this are what I live for as a photographer!

 

NEW SEASHELL GALLERY ADDED!

As many of you know, I have an online gallery of beautiful images for sale.  I just added a new category to my online gallery titled SEASHELLS.  Growing up down the Jersey shore, seashells were unavoidable. Just like most other kids I’d love walking the beach trying to find the perfect seashell.  Sometimes I’d find it immediately and others I would not find it at all.  Seashells were such an important part of my childhood.  It is only fitting that I explore that passion and capture as many beautiful images as I can.

I am not giving up on my other work.  Music and Sports are still my specialties.  Seashells are going to be a new personal project of mine.  I look forward to the new challenge and joy of capturing these images and telling their stories. These are the first 2 images added to the gallery.  There will be plenty more to come!

The new SEASHELL gallery can be found here: http://www.steinhauserphotography.com/gallery/seashells

YOUTH BASKETBALL

Last weekend I had the pleasure of photographing a youth basketball game.  It was a great opportunity to work on a sport that I had never shot before.  I will say that it was a learning experience.

The game was held in an elementary school gym.  The plus side of that is that I had complete access to shoot from any location in that gym.  I chose a location directly under the basket.  This gave me excellent views when the players were both near me and at the other end of the court.  The down side of shooting in an elementary school gym was that the lighting was horrible.  I shot the entire game with a 70-200mm f/2.8.  The aperture was wide open at f/2.8 the entire game.  I jacked up my ISO to 3200.  This combination still only yield shutters speed of 1/250th & 1/320th.  Normally this just would not work for sports.  However, being that these were young kids that move slower than college or pro athletes, I was able to make due.

Shooting from under the basket also allowed me to shoot up on the players.  This perspective makes them appear larger and in my own words, awesomer!  Something I found myself doing was sticking at on zoom level for a specific time period, rather than zoom around through the game.  For example I would stay at 200mm for the entire 1st quarter.  Then I would shoot at 70mm for the 2nd quarter.  Doing this presented some uniques shots that I normally would not have scene if I had been zoom around.

Overall, this was a fun experience.  The team won the game and I had a blast capturing the images!

I WAS ALMOST RUN OVER BY A TRAIN!

UPDATE! All images in this post are now available for sale as prints in my online gallery.   http://www.steinhauserphotography.com/gallery/buildingsandstructures

So there are these train tracks that run not that far away from my house.  I have to drive over them every day to and from work.  However the overpass itself is in bad shape and last year the state began construction on a new overpass.  It has been a long process that affected the commute of everyone.  Not too long ago the new overpass was opened and everyone was happy.

For a long time I had always wanted to photograph the old overpass from down near the train tracks.  Since the new overpass had opened that meant the demolition of the old overpass could commence.  That also meant that I had a limited amount of time to capture my pictures before the old overpass was gone forever.  Everyday I drove to work I would look over to see how the demolition was coming along.  Last week I noticed that they had the giant jack hammers working on the overpass.  It was basically now or never.

This past weekend I lucked out.  1) The overpass was still intact and 2) None of the construction vehicles were left parked on the overpass, which would have ruined the pictures I wanted to take.  So I made my way down near the train tracks and began capturing pictures of the old overpass.  While taking pictures I discovered that there was more than just train tracks down there.  There were two abandoned stations and two sets of concrete stairs that led up to the road.  What a find!

Near the end of adventure I setup my tripod pretty close to the tracks while I tried to capture an image of one of the stations.  It was too long into taking those pictures that I began to feel a slight rumble in the ground.  I looked down the tracks and saw nothing.  My “spidey-sense” advised me to check behind me and sure enough, there was a big-ass freight train come down the tracks!  I grabbed my gear and moved away from the tracks.  As the train passed I stood there in aww.  It was massive and loud.  After a few moments of frozen wonderment I remembered that I had a camera and should be capturing pictures of this big behemoth traveling down the tracks.  As I was clicking away I kept saying to myself, “man if this thing comes off the tracks I am a goner!” So after a few dozen clicks, I decided to high-tail it out of there.

So there you go.  I stared down the iron beast and lived to tell about it.  If I was run over do you think they would make a funny song for me?  I mean grandma got run over by a reindeer is a smash hit!

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE COKE?

I visited the Coca Cola museum back in 2009.  What a fun place.  While there I captured this cool picture of these bottles decorated and designed with such creativity.  I had some fun with it using the Topaz Adjust plug-in.  It was fun to play around with the different effects available.

Over the weekend I was reminiscing about that trip and decided to pull out that image and play with it again.  This time I sent it through Topaz Adjust 5.  After a short time of playing around, I came up with these two results.  Both are interesting in there own way.

Which version do you like and why?

 

ME LOVE COOKIES!

When I was growing up we were not blessed with the wonderful programming of Nickelodeon or Disney Channel.  We did have PBS which of course was (and still is) the home of Sesame Street.  Although BigBird was the favorite of many kids, my favorite was Cookie Monster.  He had the appetite of a T-Rex while retaining the heart and kindness of a butterfly.  I felt he would be as loyal to me as my own dog.  I couldn’t help by love the guy, uh monster.

On Christmas Eve, we were leaving cookies and milk out for Santa.  I began wondering what would happen if Cookie Monster and Santa met at the table and only one cookie was left.  I then imagined this epic battle royal between the two.  You know, like 100 year war kind of battle.  Although as much as I ran the battle through my head, I was never able to come up with a winner.  It then hit me that Cookie Monster and Santa, being the kind souls that they are, would probably end up sharing the cookie.

 

-Enjoy

HAROLD’S DELI

Throughout the internet this word is over-used and has lost a lot of it’s true meaning, but the serving size of the meals at Harold’s Deli are EPIC!  If you don’t believe me then Google “Harolds Deli” and check out the images for yourself.

The place was packed last night.  Most people at my table ordered the corned beef sandwich.  That would be the glorious mound of meat in the picture above.  My wife had the turkey and swiss sandwich.  This thing would feed a family of five.  Needless to say we have left overs to get us through the new year!  I had the bacon cheeseburger.  It came loaded with what seemed like a side of bacon.  Although it didn’t look all that impressive, it  put up quite a battle.

Lastly, we ordered the chocolate mousse cake.  Again, huge!  When all was said and done, I think the knife and fork got an equal workout when it came to making our way through all of the food.  We don’t go here a lot, but when we do it is….EPIC!