“Your pizza will be ready in 25 minutes.”
Just enough time to find a feature.
My daily hunt for another photo to add to the My Final Photo collection is the most challenging aspect of my daily life.
Some days the photos are obvious. They come from commercial and portrait assignments. And from editorial assignments when editorial was more popular. The loss of newspaper readership and the subsequent decline in news editorial photos reduced that number significantly.
Still, each day I make the decision to add to the collection. Yesterday was no different, except in one manner.
I forced myself to shoot only the amount of time it would take Rofini’s Pizza to make the sausage-pepperoni and onion-green pepper-mushroom pies required to quiet the appetites of my wife and teenage granddaughters.
After paying cash, no credit or debit cards allowed, I was off to find my photo.
The closet, most likely spot to look with the high school athletic fields. They are usually busy on every afternoon with teams in training and individuals trying to make themselves more healthy with personal workout routines. The late afternoon sun would provide cross lighting.
The walk to the field was about 100 yards, a distance easy to gauge because the walk paralleled the adjacent football field and track. The infield was recently scraped and provided a rough surface for that low angle sunlight. The players cast long shadows across the clay during infield practice. As one coach hit grounders, several others worked with the players adjusting their stance and positioning and praising their good fielding.
In some respects, this was an easy choice for a subject. I’d not been to the fields at the school for some time because the subject matter was often routine and easily duplicated on any afternoon. The challenge today was create photos in a limited time.
I began with a telephoto shot with the 70-200mm f2.8 from behind the coach hitting fungo to the fielders. The first images were wide taking in the coach, bat and background. I shot only a couple of shot before zooming the lens tighter and going vertical to pull the background closer. The depth-of-field was set deep enough to give me a fair amount o focus where the bat hit the ball but narrow enough to keep the background blurred.
I pre-focused using a spot on the ground approximately over the spot where it appeared the bat was meeting the ball.
My timing came from keeping both eyes open to watch the bat. With one eye closed all I would see was the bat and ball entering the frame with not enough time to fire the shutter to get bat on ball. My left eye saw enough out of the camera frame that I could anticipate the shot.
Knowing I only had a few minutes, I quickly switched to the 14-24mm f2.8 lens for a wider view. I started with an eye=-level shot of the coach hitting the ball, the followed with a “Hail Mary” angle with the camera held high over my head. The next series of frames were from a lower angle as I squatted as low as I could.
A quick chimp showed me the photos, although good, were ordinary. I wanted more.
As I stepped back from my squatting position the coaches repositioned themselves closer to home plate dropping bats and ball behind them. Two balls fell together and immediately became my foreground objects.
I checked my focus, the f-stop for greater depth-of-field, the shutter speed to stop the swing and lowered my camera to the clay angled up enough to place the balls lower in the frame and give me enough sky for the coach to be framed against it.
I couldn’t see exactly what I was shooting so I chimped between each swing to check my timing and angle. With a couple of the pitches I backed off with the zoom for another frame of bat on ball but returned to the lower position until I knew my time had expired and the pizzas would be ready when I returned to Rofini’s.
They were and my pieces of sausage-per were great.
And, the photos didn’t turn out too bad either. From the first photo until the last was 9 minutes and 40 seconds.
