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- Name
- Andy
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Today's "Sports Shooting in 10 Easy Steps" lesson - shoot tethered to my laptop so pics are available on the laptop within seconds of the shutter being released. Then pick the good stuff, caption and FTP up the line in more-or-less real time whilst the game is in progress. The idea was to make it quicker and easier than having to take a card out of the camera, upload whilst putting another card in, formatting it etc etc.
Things didn't start off too well this morning when I was testing the tethered shooting thing, with the camera USB'd to the laptop and using EOS utilities to suck the shots of the camera. I configured EOS utilities to put the pics in a particular directory, and then set Lightroom up to "Auto-Import" by telling it which directory to watch, and then to grab pics from that directory, import them with keywords etc into Lightroom ready for me to look at.
Straight away I found Lightroom totally screwed with no pictures in it at all. Major panic - I thought I'd lost all my config and previous pics (though they are all on my desktop PC). After a while I figured out that I'd opened a non-existent catalogue. When I opened the proper one all my pics came back. However, when I started the auto-import Lightroom kept popping up the import dialogue box. This shouldn't happen - it shouldn't need any user intervention at all.
This now took me 3 hours to sort out and I was going bonkers. I just couldn't stop the dialogue box popping up. Aaagghhhh! I tried changing loads of config settings but it wouldn't go away. Eventually, about 10 mins before heading off to the match, I tried one last thing which was to change the config in EOS Utilities to NOT launch an application automatically. This fixed it - I think EOS Utilities was triggering the Lightroom import dialogue every time a new set of pics came in from the camera. So there you go - if you have the same problem that's how to fix it.
A chilly day, ambient lighting getting lower during the match making manual exposure a bit tricky so I started on Av. Also, they turned up the floodlights during the second half when I had gone over to manual which increased the exposure by a stop or so. To make matters more interesting, Saracens were playing in black, against a fairly dark background, and Bristol were in white. Cue over-exposure of the whites. I ended up metering off a white advertising hoarding next to me and using manual which worked pretty well. I shot from the 22 line as everyone else was behind the tryline and I didn't want to get the same as the rest.
The tethered shooting was working fine. Pics popping up a few seconds after shooting them, and I could pick the good ones and flag them in Lightroom really quickly. Once the play went to the far end, or there was a lull, I'd look at the flagged shots, pick the best and caption them, then export them into another directory where Filezilla was waiting to FTP them up. With a good shot I could get it captioned & uploaded within a minute. Good stuff! Still some streamlining to go but a decent start. I've a way to go to beat Getty's slick operation, and got to say their snapper was really pretty good today. I'm going to try and work out using Photomechanic instead of Lightroom as it has built in FTP and is made for this sort of thing.
So onto some pics....oh, and Bristol got nailed big time, losing 37-13. I'm not as happy with my shots compared to last week. I'm not sure why - perhaps its the black and white kit that results in a lack of colour & zap to the pics. I also always check out what the Getty guy gets (easy by checking the Getty Sport website) and he definitely got a good set this time round.
#1 Alfie To-oala offloads. Check out his biceps!
#2 Glen Jackson. He's a bit good.
#3 Noah Cato - also a bit good. Saracens have built an excellent team.
#4 A rare moment of Bristol posession
#5 Shot of the day for me - Vunga Lilo jumps high.
#6 Story of the day - Bristol give away yet another penalty which Glen Jackson eats up for another 3 points.
#7 Winner - though you wouldn't know it. Eddie Jones of Saracens
#8 Loser - Richard Hill of Bristol
Oh yes, all shot with a 1Dmk3 and 300 2.8.
Tobers
Things didn't start off too well this morning when I was testing the tethered shooting thing, with the camera USB'd to the laptop and using EOS utilities to suck the shots of the camera. I configured EOS utilities to put the pics in a particular directory, and then set Lightroom up to "Auto-Import" by telling it which directory to watch, and then to grab pics from that directory, import them with keywords etc into Lightroom ready for me to look at.
Straight away I found Lightroom totally screwed with no pictures in it at all. Major panic - I thought I'd lost all my config and previous pics (though they are all on my desktop PC). After a while I figured out that I'd opened a non-existent catalogue. When I opened the proper one all my pics came back. However, when I started the auto-import Lightroom kept popping up the import dialogue box. This shouldn't happen - it shouldn't need any user intervention at all.
This now took me 3 hours to sort out and I was going bonkers. I just couldn't stop the dialogue box popping up. Aaagghhhh! I tried changing loads of config settings but it wouldn't go away. Eventually, about 10 mins before heading off to the match, I tried one last thing which was to change the config in EOS Utilities to NOT launch an application automatically. This fixed it - I think EOS Utilities was triggering the Lightroom import dialogue every time a new set of pics came in from the camera. So there you go - if you have the same problem that's how to fix it.
A chilly day, ambient lighting getting lower during the match making manual exposure a bit tricky so I started on Av. Also, they turned up the floodlights during the second half when I had gone over to manual which increased the exposure by a stop or so. To make matters more interesting, Saracens were playing in black, against a fairly dark background, and Bristol were in white. Cue over-exposure of the whites. I ended up metering off a white advertising hoarding next to me and using manual which worked pretty well. I shot from the 22 line as everyone else was behind the tryline and I didn't want to get the same as the rest.
The tethered shooting was working fine. Pics popping up a few seconds after shooting them, and I could pick the good ones and flag them in Lightroom really quickly. Once the play went to the far end, or there was a lull, I'd look at the flagged shots, pick the best and caption them, then export them into another directory where Filezilla was waiting to FTP them up. With a good shot I could get it captioned & uploaded within a minute. Good stuff! Still some streamlining to go but a decent start. I've a way to go to beat Getty's slick operation, and got to say their snapper was really pretty good today. I'm going to try and work out using Photomechanic instead of Lightroom as it has built in FTP and is made for this sort of thing.
So onto some pics....oh, and Bristol got nailed big time, losing 37-13. I'm not as happy with my shots compared to last week. I'm not sure why - perhaps its the black and white kit that results in a lack of colour & zap to the pics. I also always check out what the Getty guy gets (easy by checking the Getty Sport website) and he definitely got a good set this time round.
#1 Alfie To-oala offloads. Check out his biceps!
#2 Glen Jackson. He's a bit good.
#3 Noah Cato - also a bit good. Saracens have built an excellent team.
#4 A rare moment of Bristol posession
#5 Shot of the day for me - Vunga Lilo jumps high.
#6 Story of the day - Bristol give away yet another penalty which Glen Jackson eats up for another 3 points.
#7 Winner - though you wouldn't know it. Eddie Jones of Saracens
#8 Loser - Richard Hill of Bristol
Oh yes, all shot with a 1Dmk3 and 300 2.8.
Tobers
)
