John Larson, FPSA, MPSA2
November 2024 - Volleyball Cheerleaders
About the Image(s)
My wife Carolyn and I have season tickets to football and men’s and women’s basketball for Penn State. That give use free admission to most of the other sporting events at the college, volleyball being one of them. This image was taken during a women’s volleyball game (they are in the top ten nationally) and they won against Michigan. The cheerleaders are also part of the attraction and I thought this image was better in black and white because it showed fewer distractions.
Camera Settings:
Creation Date: 1030/2024 Camera: Canon, Camera Model: Canon EOS R6, Shutter Speed: 1/1600, Aperture: f/3.2, ISO 4000, Lens 80 ??“ 200 f.2.8 @ 70mm
Post processing:
Normal LR and PS adjustments. The. used Photo AI for Denoise and Sharpening. To convert to B&W I duplicated the layer, used the overlay blending mode, added a black and white adjustment layer and then adjusted the opacity of the middle layer to give the amount of darkness that I wanted.
6 comments posted
I see nicely captured tones, and crisp focus (surprising considering one of the women is in flight!). I am interested in the way clarity is maintained even at such high ISO setting: clearly it enables the high shutter speed in what I assume is poor lighting conditions, but I am surprised not to see more noise. (?)
The composition seems to me to lack a subject. My eye is actually drawn to the men's white chests and thus is swept, left to right, out of the image. My preference would be to crop so as to designate the floating woman as the subject (I think her expression and posture support this choice), thus: Posted: 11/11/2024 18:51:16
This was a difficult subject to take given your vantage point and the considerable background distractions. But you have caught a good moment and your decision to convert to mono was the right one. But I agree with Gerard - there are too many things in the image and Gerard's crop does help to resolve that. If you use the remove tool in Photoshop it would be helpful to take out the First Aid sign in the background and possibly the man in the white shirt top right behind the cheerleader with her raised arms. But even so, this still leaves quite a lot distractions. Posted: 11/12/2024 16:40:07
You caught the action with nice sharp details. Good tonal variation. I agree with the others that there are distractions. I removed the first aid sign and man in the white shirt and cropped it per Peter's and Gerard's suggestions. I also darkened the background thus highlighting the cheerleaders using the radial gradient. Posted: 11/12/2024 17:30:55
