One thing I’ve been wanting to share here are a few workflow tips on photographing sports for your kids. These are things I’ve worked into my PhotoFlow over time and they really save me time and stress – especially when shooting photos to share with the team.

1. Workflow Starts Before The Game (Setting Up To Sync)

If you are shooting with an SLR there are a few things you can do to make your post-processing seamless. Basketball is shot in different gyms with different lighting so getting a good white balance is critical. One of the tricks I use is to zoom in on anything white around the court (most often it is a piece of a players uniform), switch to manual focus and blur the image then take a shot. I then will set the custom white balance with that shot.

After downloading photos into Lightroom I select the Previous Import collection on the left pane. Then I use the white eyedropper tool in Develop mode to set the white balance of the photo. Pressing “G” to switch back to Library mode I then press CTRL/CMD+A to select all the photos from the game and then press Sync Settings on the lower right of the right library pane.  I choose white balance and Synchronize and the white balance is corrected for all the photos.

You will find the Sync settings in Lightroom to truly be a major timesaver. There are times when I still have to fine tune develop settings but more often than not this gives me exactly what I need.

2. Store The Season’s Photos in One Computer Folder

3. Delete

4. Keyword Players with Number & Name

I learned this one the hard way. Try shooting photos of an entire season – that’s 20+ Varsity games with about 50 photos a game. Then try to share those photos with parents in a way that is meaningful for each player. Chances are a disk with over 1000 images is just too overwhelming to get through.

This year I got smart and started a keyword category with the team name and then added each player as a sub-keyword with #-Lastname_firstname. Most teams will have a written program with the player’s names and numbers which is a great help in building these keywords/tags.

I know some will ask why I put the number first and there is a good reason! When you are key wording your photos, you will find that it is much easier and faster to keyword according to number – especially with new players you don’t recognize early in the season. Most photos will show the uniform and player number, making the process of key wording a breeze.

Now there are also sports where players don’t have numbers – in that case I just keyword in a “lastname_firstname” or “firstname_lastname” fashion. Choose whichever is easier for you to recognize as you keyword.

5. Star Ratings

My usual workflow goes something like this – sync, delete, key wording, basic editing. During my final pass I then add star ratings to my photos. This is something that has literally saved me hours of searching. 1 star means the photo gets uploaded to the team Facebook page. 2 stars means it is in the running for a great individual shot (I often share these with our local newspaper). 3 stars means it goes into my personal portfolio of favorite images.

Star ratings come in especially helpful when administration, coaches and media call for images of a particular player. They also come in handy for the coaches’ annual photo book and senior night spotlights. When you have around 300 images of some of your top players it makes it so easy to filter down to the best images to share.

6. Get Help When Choosing Photos

I often will get my daughter’s opinion when going through the first pass to delete photos. While I tend to look at the images from a technical perspective, she has the player’s perspective and can easily spot photos they will love.  It’s always good to get a second opinion from a peer of your photo subjects.

7. Share on Facebook

One of my favorite tools for sharing is Facebook. Create albums based on individual games and share. Set the album privacy to public and then share the albums on the team’s Facebook page. Players and parents will tag their girls and the comments are a fun way to share stories behind the photos written by the players. Lightroom’s interface with Facebook allows you download these comments. Generally I only copy comments that are most relevant and add them to the caption field for the photo.

8. Create a Keyword and Sub-Keywords for Teams Played

This is something I implemented late in the last season and wished I had done it earlier. With a Teams Played keyword and then sub-keywords for the names of the teams you can easily filter photos. This comes in especially handy when trying to gather good photos from several games instead of just one. It is also fun when you have a longstanding team rivalry and can provide past photos for the two teams quickly.

9. Don’t Forget Coaches and Refs

Some of my favorite photos are of coaches and referees doing their thing. Coaches hold a special place in hearts of players – you don’t want to miss opportunities to include them in the season’s photo collection.

I also recommend including referees – they seriously add so much to the game. It is also great to get both the coach and referee in a shot that shows the tension of the game:

I must confess I have a keyword called “Refs” and when games get particularly stressful because of lots of bad calls, I photograph the refs making them. Honestly it is a coping mechanism. I call it my game therapy because taking a photo of the ref is much better than yelling at the ref or running on the court to tell him where to go… but I digress.

10. Export to Share

The final step of this workflow happens at the end of the season. Filter to a player, press CTRL/CMD +A to select all the photos and then choose File > Export then export to a file folder on your desktop named for each individual player. When finished with all the players’ individual folders, filter down to photos by game and export to individual folders for each game. Finally, burn photos for each player including their individual folder and the game folders. It really is that simple.

I also usually create a coaches book which includes layouts for each player and letters to the coaches – without this workflow it wouldn’t be possible – but I’ll save the how-to on that for another post.

Whew! That’s a lot of info in one post but hopefully it is helpful. Now I’m running off to get packed! Any suggestions on locations for great photos in Vegas? I’m all ears!

We have had several wildfires a little to close to our home these past few weeks so even though fireworks are legal if we do anything this year we will probably limit it to sparklers. Wishing you all a wonderful 4th of July – no matter where you live!

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So many things I’d love to share with you today to help you celebrate, but I will keep this post simple. There are a lot of great posts in blog land about capturing fireworks.  Rather than add to the fray, I thought I would focus on sparklers, one of our family’s favorite 4th of July traditions.

I need to preface this information with a disclaimer: Sparklers can be very dangerous – so please read this safety information before allowing your children to use them. 

Sparklers are paintbrushes of light – and if you time it right and play with your camera settings, you really can capture some cool shots -

I love this shot of my daughter Grace just having fun – she looks like a butterfly.  The settings on my camera were:

• Shutter Speed: 2.0 seconds
• Aperture: F/6.3
• ISO 400
• Zoom: 24mm
• Mode: Shutter Priority

Now what does that all mean?  The first thing you will want to know is the mode of my camera – I had the dial set to TV or Shutter Priority.

Above you may note that I shared the technical details of my photo with the shutter speed in seconds.  However, when you  adjust your shutter speed on your camera screen, it never says “2 seconds”  it gives you a shorter display like 1/100, 1/60 or 1/30.  When you really slow things down to one second or more you’ll see two small lines next to the shutter speed like 2“.

Forgive the quality of the above iPhone photo, but it will give you an idea.  To sum it up, 1/100 is like 100 and is faster the 1/30 (or 30); both are faster than 30″.  If you see a number followed by ” that is the shutter speed in seconds.

My advice to you is to set your camera in shutter priority mode this weekend and play with shutter speeds to see what you can come up with.  A tripod is extremly helpful if you want sharper shots but in a pinch you could use a patio table, stool, etc.

Here are a few more examples:

• Shutter Speed: 2.5 seconds (2″5 on camera settings screen)
• Aperture: F/9
• ISO 400
• Zoom: 24mm
• Mode: Shutter Priority

• Shutter Speed: 4.0 seconds (4″ on camera settings screen)
• Aperture: F/13
• ISO 400
• Zoom: 34mm
• Mode: Shutter Priority

So get out this week and have some fun with your camera!

Yet there’s little time amongst deadlines and move preparations to just shoot. It took a once in a lifetime event along with a kind invitation from friends to pull me out of my work cave this evening. I’m so glad I went… because I was able to get photos I’d never get again… along with photos of friends we love who are just really cool people…

I also got to get a fun and crazy pic of my husband with one of his best neighborhood friends… On a sidenote, does anyone see anything missing in this photo? Hint – if you asked Troy he would tell you a good joke about it!

The kids also had a great time with multiple looks in the telescope -

Em & Grace got to spend time with their favorite fur person (they walk him all the time – I’m allergic to dogs so Stryder is the neighbor’s dog that they love and can’t bring home)…

Sometimes you just have to step away from the urgent and enjoy the people you love… because memories made with the people you love are like the Venus Transit – the best only happen once in a lifetime…

True confession: I’ve been scared to death to tackle the boxes and boxes of vintage family photos until recently. It wasn’t until I began outsourcing the scans that it seemed doable.

I realize I still have all the digital work: tagging, captioning and editing. Yet that all seems a lot more doable then finding time to scan. I’m not really sure why.

The above slides were a happy find last week. They contain some of our most treasured family images and they have been perfectly preserved.  Images like this one  of my Uncles and Aunt as children.

And this one of my grandparents on a trip to Hawaii in 1961… you can barely see my grandmother carrying her train case   in the lower left corner of the image. I love train cases because when there was a train case in the bathroom at our home it always meant that grandma was there and memories would be made…

I’m learning that organizing is a sifting process.  The boxes and boxes of family memorabilia I inherited aren’t just neatly organized with photos and slides – they are intermixed with family stories, birth dates, old cards and postcards, mixed in with papers showing important dates of life and family events.

The first sifting occurred when I sorted through everything and weeded out duplicates and things that weren’t necessary. That was really difficult because I come from a family of savers. My grandmother saved every college paper she ever wrote. Receipts for just about everything she bought. Cards that everyone sent. A big part of this project has been just making the decisions as to what is most important. Because too much information is really still too much information no matter how much you love the person it is associated with.

In the second sifting I sorted through with the intention to find all the photos that needed to be scanned – I came across some fun items – like old programs from fundraising events. I loved the vintage ads – especially this one…

The crazy connection here is that my grandmother lived in Idaho all my life. However, when she was married and her children were young, she lived in Bountiful, Utah. Fast forward 50 years and Troy and I lived in Centerville, Utah where my favorite gardening store just happened to be J and L.

It was fun to see that my grandmother frequented the same garden store when she was my age and her children were young as mine were when we lived in Centerville. It was fun to discover a connection she and I both have to one business over fifty years apart. Another fun tidbit is that when my grandmother lived in Bountiful J and L was in Centerville. When I lived in Centerville J and L was in Bountiful.

It really makes me think about how future generations will view our photos with GPS coordinates today. How many places will we both be generations apart?

It is a big project to try and curate these photos. It’s not just about getting them organized but the larger goals of finding the best way to share them – especially with family members who aren’t very tech friendly.

Even with the challenges this project presents, I am so grateful for the perspective it gives me. As I work to organize and share the memories of my family, I am beginning to see better ways to curate the present in a way that will be meaningful for future generations.

I love photography so much that I actually refuse to turn it into a business – I sincerely think the workaholic in me would ruin all the fun!

So when the opportunity presented itself to chase light in Arizona shooting my nephew’s senior pics, I was in. We scouted out the location the morning before to make sure that we could get it in the best light.

My nephew and his friends wondered why the light wouldn’t be the same at sunrise as it was at sunset. Valid question (obviously teenagers would prefer a sunset shoot over a sunrise shoot). I explained that the way the light hit the old abandoned warehouse windows and doors perfectly at sunrise. At sunset the concrete walls on the west side would block it all.

So off we went at 5:45am, a bit groggy but ready to chase light…

And it was so worth it…

See the rake lighting from the garage doors to the east?

We also used the light to get some cool silhouette photos like this one (which I later edited in Lightroom to add the graduated filters with color to make it look like a killer sunrise):

I also had some fun with textures – here is the before and after (you can view it larger here):

Here’s a look at the layers palette for the texture photo – remember this texture? I applied it first as an overlay with a 63% opacity:

I then applied the Elysium Flypaper Texture, using a layer mask to remove the texture from my nephew. You can find it as part of the Taster Package for $9.99 here. (That isn’t an affiliate link – just pointing you to one of my favorite resources).

All in all it was an awesome day! Also for my FPF101 students, yes I keyworded and captioned the photos – there were quite a few fun stories behind the photos I will share in another post. This place was a pretty crazy place to shoot – not sure I’d go there after dark!