“Capturing Alaska”
with Wayde Carroll






2008 Speedo/ Alaska Junior Swim Olympics Pics


  
  Last week I got to photograph some of the 2008 Speedo/ Alaska Junior Swim Olympics for Alaska Newspapers and the Seward Phoenix Log. I love sports and shooting action but when I got the call and heard the words “indoor swim meet” I said “no problem!” out loud but harbored serious concerns internally. Action, indoors. I knew this meant two things before I even showed up: low light and horrible color balance!
  The event was held at Bartlett High School. I had never been there and I had never shot for Alaska Newspapers before. I was excited to get the gig but worried it would be a failure. What a difficult situation for a first assignment with a new client!
  I was scheduled to shoot from 2pm to 4pm. I searched the internet to see if I could find anyone’s photos from that venue, what I found was less than encouraging: dark, bleak, green. Just what I thought. I decided to scout the location that morning so I would know exactly what I had gotten myself into.
  I arrived at the pool around 9:30am and was happy to see that the competition was already in progress. Now I could make some tests under actual shooting conditions with action to boot.
  While the lighting was a ghastly green, and somewhat low, it wasn’t the worst I’d ever seen and it was fairly evenly distributed throughout.
  The first thing I did was photograph a gray card and set a custom white balance to it in the camera. This gave fairly accurate results as far as skin tone etc. I also chose to shoot in RAW so I could make any color corrections necessary more easily in post- production.
  To freeze the action I wanted to make sure I maintained the fastest shutter speed possible. I had to push the ISO to 1600 to get 1/500 of a second at F4. This was actually about one stop under exposed but I’d rather hold the shutter speed and boost the exposure later than risk an unacceptable amount of out of focus images. One stop under doesn’t increase the noise too much but I didn’t want to go any lower than that.
  The next important step was to consult with the meet officials and find out where it was ok for me to shoot from. Nothing is more embarrassing than being hollered at in front of one thousand people because you’ve positioned yourself, say, in front of a judge you hadn’t noticed! (Yes, I learned this previously the hard way!)
  With that settled I shot a couple of events from different locations and went home to review the results. Everything was acceptable and I felt fully confident going back to the event later that day. Doing a little pre-planning makes for a much more relaxed, creative, and stress-free assignment!
  I shot the event in manual at the settings I had previously determined. I had one camera with a 70-200mm F4 lens that I used for close-up action. On a second body I had the 24-70mm F2.8 lens for wider views. For the most part I used the auto-servo focusing that tracks your subject as it moves but once in a while, if I had a specific composition I wanted, I would just pre-focus on a spot and shoot multiple exposures as the subject(s) entered my framing.
  I was happy with the results and my clients were too!