Overview

Since high school volleyball matches are played until one team wins 3 games, the match duration can be pretty variable.  So, I found myself showing up early for an Annandale High School varsity game at Mt. Vernon High School, just in case the prior JV match ended early.  But as it turns out, I was there in time to see the whole JV match as well (I guess the Freshman match went the full length.).  In any case, since I was there, I started shooting the JV match.

Here are links to the password-protected galleries of photos that I shot for these games.  They are split into 3 galleries to reduce the chance that users will encounter timeout or memory limit errors.

• October 17, 2017 – Annandale HS vs. Mt. Vernon HS Part 1 (80 photos)
• October 17, 2017 – Annandale HS vs. Mt. Vernon HS Part 2 (80 photos)
• October 17, 2017 – Annandale HS vs. Mt. Vernon HS Part 3 (60 photos)

Some of the better photos are as follows:

Lessons Learned

1.  The Color Contrast of Jerseys Really Does Make a Difference to the Photographer

I was very surprised about how many good shots I got from this game.  In reviewing my take, it became clear to me that, besides the overall large number of photos that seemed to be in focus, there was a smaller percentage of photos of the player in black that were in focus.  What I deduce from this is that my D500 camera had a much easier time finding focus for the players that were wearing the red and white jerseys than the player with the solid black jersey.  But in addition, it seemed like a greater percentage of those were in focus than I’ve seen while photographing other teams with simpler two-toned jerseys.  My conclusion is that two-toned jerseys, and in particular the extra stripe running around the shoulders and down the sides, really helped my camera find focus.

I wish I knew for sure whether I was using the Single-Point focus mode, or the 25-point Dynamic Area focus mode (Unfortunately, this isn’t recorded in the photo metadata.).  I will guess that I was using the latter, because otherwise I think I would have gotten even fewer in-focus shots of the player in black.

2.  There are Limits to How Big My Galleries Should Be

Initially, I loaded all 220 photos from this JV match into one gallery.  But what I found was that I was getting error messages when I tried to open the gallery on my phone.  This could have been either due to tripping a timeout while opening the file through a lower bandwidth connection, or due to a file-size/memory-limit issue with the mobile device.  In either case, once I broke the single gallery into three, I seemed to be able to open it on my phone.