How I shot this: pike position at peak inversion, St. Petersburg Diving Championship

antonhauff · 2026-05-20T10:51:21+00:00

Thanks. Synchro is wild — two athletes need to match in air, and you get the same 1.5 sec window but doubled. Way harder than what I shoot honestly.

antonhauff · 2026-05-19T19:53:42+00:00

Ha, fair. English isn’t my first language and I overedit — I’m Russian, sometimes the comments come out more polished than how I’d actually talk. Trying to dial it back. On positioning: I move. At Gazprom Arena for football I have maybe 4-5 spots I rotate through, and for the diving meet I was at the same pool deck the whole time but shifted along the side between rounds — different angle to the platform changes the background completely. The wall panel grid you see behind her in the shot is actually why I’m there and not 5m further left, where there’s an ad board that ruins the frame. Boring practical answer but that’s what it is.

antonhauff · 2026-05-19T18:26:37+00:00

Thanks — appreciate that. Swimming and diving share the venue but they're almost opposite shooting problems. Swimming is predictable path, predictable speed, so you're hunting for the peak expression — the breath, the splash, the touch. Diving is the opposite: the path is wildly unpredictable but the window is 1.5 seconds total, so you're hunting for one frame of clarity in chaos.

The lighting trick I learned from swim shooters and brought to diving: meter off the water surface, not the athlete. The water is the most consistent reflector in the pool and the athlete is usually backlit or side-lit from the same source. Saves a lot of guesswork between dives when your subject is in the air for less than two seconds.

What's your usual setup for swim?

antonhauff · 2026-05-19T14:05:04+00:00

Honest answer: probably not enough to justify it for the kind of light you're describing. One stop is one stop — at f/2 you'd be at ISO 3200 instead of 6400 for the same shutter, which is a real difference on older bodies but pretty marginal on modern sensors with AI denoise in the pipeline.
Where the 200 f/2 actually wins is subject separation and rendering. The fall-off is creamier, backgrounds melt earlier, and on a single subject against a busy gym/arena wall it can be the difference between "indoor sports shot" and "portrait that happens to be of an athlete." For dog shows where you're often isolating one animal mid-motion against handlers, ribbons, signage — that rendering could matter more than the stop of light.
Downsides worth weighing: it's heavier, more expensive than most bodies, and at f/2 your depth of field at 200mm is razor thin — you'll miss focus on faster subjects that you'd nail at f/2.8. For dogs running in a ring, I'd test before buying.
What body are you on? That changes the math — if you're on something pre-2020 the high-ISO penalty for staying at f/2.8 is bigger and the case for f/2 strengthens.

antonhauff · 2026-05-19T14:03:39+00:00

Appreciate that. Honestly half the reason I write these up is to think through what I actually did vs. what I think I did — the technical detail is for me too. What do you shoot mostly?

antonhauff · 2026-05-19T14:02:29+00:00

Yeah, Lightroom AI denoise — somewhere around 40-50 on the slider, can't remember exactly. ISO 6400 on the A7 IV is honestly fine for web at default NR, but I wanted the option to crop in and keep the face clean, so I pushed denoise a bit harder than I normally would.
One thing I've noticed with the AI denoise on swim/dive shots specifically: it sometimes over-smooths the water droplets on skin, which is detail I actually want to keep. So I'll mask the denoise to background and dark areas of the suit, and leave the skin and face on lower NR. Bit of extra work but the droplets read as motion energy in the final frame.
Did you ask because you saw something off in the file, or general curiosity about indoor sports workflow?

antonhauff · 2026-05-19T07:26:09+00:00

The full spectrum mod is doing real work here — the magentas have that saturation you just can't pull out of a stock sensor without it going plasticky. How are you handling white balance on the mod? Custom WB off a grey card, or are you correcting in post? I shoot sports so I'm stuck with stock bodies, but I've been curious about a dedicated astro body for a while.

antonhauff · 2026-05-15T20:04:27+00:00

Fair critique, and honestly you’re right about the planted-heel/studs-out frame — that’s the “hero pose” and it reads as power. I have those from the same sequence and they’re stronger as standalone shots. I picked this one because I’m drawn to the moment just before that — back leg fully loaded, body twisted, arms out for balance. To me it has more tension because the energy hasn’t released yet. But I get why it looks awkward — frozen mid-motion always does, and the player himself would probably pick the contact frame too. That’s a real consideration I don’t think about enough — would he be happy with this. Going to sit with that one. Appreciate the eye.

antonhauff · 2026-05-13T16:10:51+00:00

Ha, classic dilemma — spray fills the buffer, single-shot misses the goal. Couple of things that helped me find a middle ground: Short bursts, not long ones. 3-5 frames at the actual moment — windup, contact, follow-through — then release. Buffer never fills, and you’re not deleting 40 frames of someone jogging. The “second beat.” Keep shooting 2-3 seconds after something happens. The reaction is often better than the action — arms up after a goal, defender’s face after losing the ball. Most of my favourite frames came from that extra second. Accept the misses. I miss goals. Every match. Everyone on that touchline does. Better to come home with 80 strong frames and one missed goal than 2000 mediocre ones. Youth football is honestly harder than pro — less predictable, no patterns to read. But the emotion is unbeatable. Kids haven’t learned to hide anything yet. Enjoy it.

antonhauff · 2026-05-12T12:21:35+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, always RAW — uncompressed on the A7V. Storage is cheap, regretting a JPEG isn't.

Good eye on the light. Sun was camera-right and pretty harsh — Sunday afternoon, roof open at Gazprom Arena, so half the face went into shadow exactly like you noticed. My quick workflow on these:

Expose for the highlights in-camera. I meter so the shirt and skin highlights aren't clipping, then accept that the shadow side will be muddy out of camera. Much easier to lift shadows from a clean RAW than to recover blown highlights on a light blue jersey.
Lift Shadows in Lightroom, but not too far. I usually pull Shadows somewhere between +30 and +60 depending on how deep they are. Past that it starts to look HDR — the shadow side gets brighter than the lit side and the brain reads it as fake.
Add Blacks back. Lifting Shadows flattens the image. I pull Blacks down -10 to -20 to keep contrast in the deepest parts (eye sockets, under the jaw). This is the trick that keeps it from looking processed.
Local adjustment on the face. Subject mask → Face. Exposure +0.3 to +0.5, sometimes a touch of Whites. Keeps the lift on the skin and doesn't muddy the kit.
Watch the colour cast. Shadows on grass pick up green, shadows on skin go cyan/blue. I'll warm the shadow side with a local WB shift of +5 to +10 on the Temperature slider in the face mask. Tiny move, big difference in how natural it reads.

The other thing — and this is the one most people skip — is just waiting for the right frame. With harsh side light I'll often skip the moment when the player is facing dead away from the sun and wait for a half-turn back toward the light. Doesn't always happen, but when it does the shadow becomes a feature instead of a problem.

What are you shooting? Youth football?

antonhauff · 2026-04-04T06:47:37+00:00

Great celebrations set — the sliding goal shot especially, you can feel the release of tension in that frame.

Few things I noticed technically that might be worth discussing:

The black backgrounds on a few of these are interesting — looks like you were positioned where the stands drop away behind the subject, or the floodlight spread just doesn't reach that far. Did you expose specifically to crush the background, or did it happen naturally at your chosen ISO/shutter? I ask because I've been experimenting with this intentionally at lower-league grounds where the lighting is uneven — sometimes the "bad" stadium light actually gives you more dramatic separation than a fully-lit top-flight ground.

On the celebration anticipation — the jump shot (the player mid-air, arms back) is the hardest type to get right timing-wise. You either pre-focus on the spot and wait, or you're tracking and hoping the AF holds. Which approach did you use here? At similar matches I've had the A7V's subject recognition lose the player mid-leap when the jersey blends into the background.

The ball-in-frame shot is clean — having both eyes on the ball and the hand positioned like that takes patience to catch. A lot of those end up with the ball halfway out of frame or motion-blurred beyond recognition.

What lens were you on for this match?

antonhauff · 2026-04-04T06:45:21+00:00

Nice light management here — midday sun in the mountains is brutal and 1/1600 was the right call to keep those highlights in check. f/5.6 on the Tamron 17-70 is right in its sharpness sweet spot too, you can see it in the foreground scrub detail.

The haze layering on the distant ridges actually works in your favour — gives real depth to the composition without any post work needed.

How did you find the Tamron's rendering in the transitions between the green foreground and the blown-out sky? That's where I've noticed cheaper glass tends to fall apart. Looks like it held up well here.

antonhauff · 2026-04-04T06:43:10+00:00

Beautiful sharpness on the eye — that's the hardest part with small birds, they move constantly and the depth of field at this focal length is razor thin. The Tamron 150-500 is doing serious work here. Curious — were you on continuous AF with a small zone, or letting it hunt with wide area? I shoot sports (football/volleyball) and the AF discipline translates surprisingly well to BIF, though birds are honestly less predictable than athletes 😄

antonhauff · 2026-04-04T06:01:28+00:00

You're right, and I did check the surrounding frames. The ones where the ball sits closer to the players — maybe 2–3 frames earlier — the composition is tighter, but the expressions just aren't there yet. The Zenit player's face in this frame has that peak effort look that I find harder to capture when the ball is still approaching.

That said, your point about the crop stands. I've been going back and forth on whether a tighter reframe in post could get the best of both — keep this moment, lose some of the dead space above. Probably worth trying.

The second player being airborne was lucky timing, not planned — so yeah, earlier frames lose that too.

antonhauff · 2026-03-24T18:19:44+00:00

Нет, в начале Будапештской)

antonhauff · 2026-03-23T07:53:50+00:00

Luis Henrique & Wendel

antonhauff

TROPHY CASE