Creativity Out of the Mundane Sep 14th | filed in: Photography tips

Every weekend included a game or a tournament.

The challenge I gave myself for their last tournament
was finding some way to really show the boys in a creative way.
After taking hundreds of pictures over the summer, I needed to do something different!

A great action shot or a good picture of the team
would just blur into the massive number of pictures I'd already taken,
even if it was a fabulous capture with perfect timing & focus.

So there they were, waiting to get their trophy for making it
all the way to the CHAMPIONSHIP GAME of their last summer tournament.
I took that (blah) picture of the entire team you see up there,
but I felt the need to tell their story a bit more.

I noticed that they were sitting on a bench together,
but since they're still young boys,
their 10-yr-old legs wouldn't let their feet touch the dirt below.

Ten-year-olds are full of dreams, excitement, and potential.
How appropriate that their feet were hovering above the Earth.
They've got their adults lives to be grounded!

For that image, I squatted down very low and used my 24-70 lens in Av mode at f/2.8
(ISO 200, and the camera chose a shutter speed of 1/200sec).
There were lots of parents standing around taking pictures at the same time
making the space very crowded,
so having that lens instead of my 70-200 lens allowed me
get that team image & their hovering feet without backing up a lot.

Here's one last shot I captured from the post-tournament party at Islands.
The boys were enjoying some desserts,
so I held that 24-70 lens up above them at the table
at the widest possible zoom and told the boys to look up into the camera.

For that image I increased the ISO to 3200 because the restaurant was very dark.

They barely agreed to stop grazing on the ice cream & chocolate
to look at the camera for a half a second
(some, including my son, didn't stop at all!)

Enjoy!

~Carey