Wow. Kids soccer is tougher than adult/teen levels!

    Seriously. I have posted before about shooting prep school level soccer and college rugby. Both of these were easy compared to shooting a 4/5 year old soccer team.

    I've played soccer for years, so I understand the flow of the game. I know what to look for- or so I thought. Kids soccer, not so much. The teen/adult players spread out across the field. They make long crossing passes. Not so much in this league, they mostly clump around the ball, wherever it goes.

    It was surprisingly difficult to get good individual shots of the players, you're definitely seeing the highlights here, most of the images just looked like small huddles with a ball in the center. Of course, a couple of the kids were pretty hard core, despite being only 5 years old...

   On the other hand, some of the kids needed a little extra help from the (extremely patient) coach to get where they needed to be...

    It was also hard to maneuver on the sidelines, because the parents who have done this before pretty much lined the sides of the field with pop up chairs, coolers and picnic blankets. Full disclosure, I wasn't there because I was hired, I was there to document my son's first soccer game. They rotated the kids in and out, so I wasn't always focused on the game. In fact, some of my favorite shots were of the sideline action

   And I can't forget my son's adoring fans....

   Anyway, it was a fun way to spend a saturday morning, I managed to get a few good shots, and I learned not to underestimate anything I am shooting, kids soccer was actually much harder to shoot well than I anticipated.

Live yoga classes, and a general update.

    I have been very sporadic with my posts lately, sorry about that, but getting ready for retirement after 20 years as a naval officer is taking up a lot of what little time I have left after my family takes their portion. I haven't been shooting as much as I would normally like to shoot, and unless I have something specific to talk about, I am not going to blog just to hear my own words. Most of what I have been doing with a camera recently has either been personal images for/of my family, things like this one of my mom and her grandchildren

or more race images, and I can only post so many of those before they get repetitive...

   So what's new? Well, I shoot yoga, and I shoot live performances. But until last weekend I hadn't gotten around to shooting a live yoga class before. It was a little different and had some challenges. I was invited to shoot an outdoor class held by the San Antonio Yoga Meetup group.  Rain was predicted, so instead of being held out in the open, the class was squeezed in under a small covered area in the park...

well, most of the class was, some wound up beyond the roofed area, about where I am standing for the shot above, but luckily the rain held off.

As you can see, not a lot of room to shoot from the front of the class, and you can only take so many shots from the back of a yoga class without looking like some sort of pervert trying to get butt shots... (I think the actual number is zero, you take more than zero shots from the rear of the class while they are in down dog, and you're pretty much done...) So I had to get creative. I really wish I would have been able to get up on top of the wall and shoot down, but I didn't have my ladder with me and any climbing would have been too disturbing to the class, so that angle was out. Closest I could come to that was standing in a small window in the wall (not visible in this shot) and holding my camera up as high as I could and shooting blindly downwards.

I also spent a little bit of time right up front trying to stay out of the teacher's way and playing with a wide angle lens.

The rest of the time, I wondered around the outskirts of the class looking for combinations of interesting angles and good moments to shoot. I managed to find a few angles that I thought were interesting, or at least different.

Even got to play a little bit with a screen of foliage

I tried to find some angles that you don't normally see yoga shots taken from

And then there's this one. It was almost an awesome shot, but I wasn't quite in sync enough with the flow of the class to see it happening soon enough to be in the right position for it. I almost made it, but not quite.

That was really the theme of the day. I felt just a little out of step and behind for most of the class. I am an experienced yogi, but for the past several years I have been practicing Ashtanga, which (improv classes aside) has a fairly strict sequence of poses and flows. Most people who have been practicing any length of time know what is coming, and the classes try to stay in sync with each other and with the breath. This was different because it was a group of people who don't normally practice together, an instructor most had never worked with before, and a complete free flow with no way to know what was coming next. I spent a lot of time out of position and missing shots. Also, because the class wasn't really in sync with each other, group shots were difficult, most of them wound up looking like a tangle of flailing limbs.

That was one of the cleaner mid-flow group shots I got. So I wasn't really happy with what I was getting. I would rather not mention how long it took me to learn this simple lesson in life, but here's your tip for the day: when you aren't happy with the way things are going, you have two choices. You can either keep doing what you've been doing and nothing will change (except your attitude will get worse) or you can change your approach and make something different happen. It won't necessarily be better, but it will be different. I've spent too much of my life going with option A and then whining about how bad the universe was treating me, but for the last 7 years or so I have been learning to roll with option B and it's generally worked out pretty well for me overall, despite some growing pains. Ok, so enough with the life lessons and all that, back to photography.

I realized that treating the class like a performance wasn't working. So I decided to approach the rest of the class the way I approach festivals like Burning Man. There's no way to capture it all, as least not with my gear and support, so I try to find details and moments that are worth capturing. This changed the day up for me and got me some of my favorite shots from the class.

First off, I tried to find some details that were interesting, or at least a different perspective.

And there are always moments where you can catch people who are totally immersed in what they are doing, and isolate them, and I always like to grab those where and when I can.

Not only is the 70-200/2.8 a great lens for shallow depth of field, it also lets you shoot from enough distance the subject isn't distracted by having a camera in their face. The ones I shot in this pose were probably my favorites of the day overall. One of them:

served as a springboard to my next few favorites. A couple of people brought their kids with them, so I started to look for moments between families, and got a few I liked.

Maybe not the greatest composition out there, but I could see the connection and I think it translates into the images. Of course, how can you resist a child in child's pose? No way I couldn't shoot that one,

Seriously, if I child does child's pose, do you just call it pose? or 'spose? 'Spose so I guess. Sorry, had to go there. Anyway, once I changed my perspective, I started enjoying myself more and I think the shots got better. Overall, it was a learning experience, and I have a feeling I will have to change my approaches and perspectives quite a bit as I transition from the military into the civilian world of my first "retirement."

Speaking of which, if anyone out there can tell me how to make $130K+ as a photographer reliably, or has some job contacts in the San Antonio area, hit me up. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this, it just wouldn't be a complete shoot without a hair flip after all....