Photo shoot for CRICKET Western

Few weeks ago a dear friend who s the president of CRICKET Western asked me if I would like to take some cool photos for the club. I took that quite literally while emphasizing on the "Cool" part. First of all, the shoot was to be done in an indoor gym, preferably at night (less ambient coming through the skylights) and mostly within a limited time frame.

What I really want to emphasize on this (in terms of practicality) is the importance of having a "shot list"!. I made one with 6 different types of shots in my mind. Since I had a very good working understanding of the game cricket, I knew how dynamic and reflexive its movements can be (for those who are not familiar with this sport please read this first). This understanding is a must for making an effective shot list which will be easier to execute as well as easier to instruct to the players. Furthermore, it makes you think about each type of shot beforehand and thus makes the shoot easier and much more smoother. The shots in this case were selected to reflect some of the physical attributes of the game as well as to dramatize some parts of the game.

Unfortunately on the day of the shoot, due to a delay of some players, the whole shoot was cut down to about 45 mins. Therefore I had to pick/prioritize my shot list and thus decided to go with 3 shot types. One that would take a little time to do and two others which will take less time and effort (relatively). Here, I did encounter some technical difficulties during the process but was able to avoid them and move forward. The guys who showed up for the shoot were amazing to work with and were prepared to perform over and over again with unbelievable enthusiasm. I hope the end results will be a just reward to them for their efforts.

Below are a sample of the results of this shoot. Please do note that all the pictures here are copyrighted. Please feel free to comment and share your thought about the pictures and also to share this post with anyone interested in Photography.

Thanks a lot.

Akila Mike.

Selective Color Experiment.

Let me start out by saying that I was not a fan of selective color (or Color popping).  But so was my opinion about HDR until I figured out the right way to do it. So, thought to give this a try as well to figure out where and when it would work best.

So, I went through some of my previous work to see which ones do work. One thing I do wanna stress is that these are my personal opinion based on my limited experience. Rather than discussing what doesn't work, I will show few examples that do work. Then we can see the underlying principle in those images. These are pics I shot during the Annual 2012 slut-walk in London Ontario.

Example (1)

Example (2)

Example (3) 

One main factor in these 3 examples are the fact that the color is used as a tool to guide and hold the viewer attention on the subject. This is specially useful when the background is busy/not completely blown/blurred out. In my view, all 3 examples work for these images in different ways. So, one thing to keep in mind is to never apply this technique to all pictures you take. It is certainly not a method to make a boring picture interesting (same problem with many HDR work I see out there).... but more of a tool to control where the viewer gaze at. So for an example, in a picture of a car, if we color pop a telephone booth in the background, we will fail at achieving our main objective.. which is to engage the viewer with the subject (the car in this example).

One really important thing to remember not to over saturate the colored areas in the picture. In all the above examples, I simply De-saturated the surrounding area and left the colored region in tact for the most part.

So hope this will guide you to do better selective color images in the future. Would love to hear any comments on counter arguments etc. 

Please note that all pics are copyrighted and are not to be used without the author's written consent. 

Thank you!
Akila.