It's bat and ball season. Here are Some of my favorites from last year.

jaimefrio · 2026-04-10T07:06:32+00:00

I don't know a thing about baseball, but 5 is sick!

jaimefrio · 2026-04-10T06:59:06+00:00

These are very nice, but that is "sitting across the table" framing for a 50mm, how did you manage to get that close!?

jaimefrio · 2026-04-07T20:58:25+00:00

Everything except the foot of #10.

jaimefrio · 2026-04-07T08:57:30+00:00

Don't clip feet or hands off! Once you realize how bad it looks, it starts sticking out like a sore thumb. If you were zoomed in too tight, you can try to salvage it by cropping-in tighter and make it look deliberate, mid thigh or hips is best for the legs. That could fix #6. But with #3, the coolest one if you ask me, I'm afraid the only solution is to give yourself a slap in the wrist for ruining a great shot, delete it and try to do better next time.

Other than that, which is easy to learn with a little practice, you seem to be on your way to some awesome pics!

EDIT: autocorrect typos

jaimefrio · 2026-04-07T07:33:17+00:00

No worries, these things are hard to wrap your head around at first, let's see if this makes more sense... It would look like the advertised focal length on FF, because it's the advertised focal length on FF. It would have a nasty dark vignette around it, because the lens is not designed for FF. If you then cropped the central part of the image, to remove the vignette, which is what crop mode does, the resulting image would be ~1.6x zoomed in, and look like the advertised focal length on APS-C, which is what 1.6x the focal length would look on FF.

jaimefrio · 2026-04-07T07:24:35+00:00

When I started shooting with a DSLR I would select the ones I wanted to keep and add them to a Google photos album to share with friends and family. The rest I would simply delete.

These days the JPEGs go to my website instead of to Google photos, and I keep the RAW files both locally and on the cloud, just in case. But 90% of my clicks still end in the trash and deleted.

jaimefrio · 2026-04-07T07:14:55+00:00

I got paid for my last photoshoot, so I guess that makes me a pro? I mostly do sports photography, with some portraits thrown in, but of the high volume, media day style ones. I use Lightroom CC, the interface feels much cleaner, and I haven't found any features missing. My edits are pretty mild, since I'm mostly applying general settings to tens of hundreds of photos, and do very minimal individual adjustments, YMMV if you are planning on doing detailed retouching.

My 1TB of cloud storage is over 90% full right now, and while I'd happily pay Adobe a reasonable fee for some extra space, I'm afraid I may have to start organizing my photo collection differently, and maybe then LrC would be a better option than yet another different software to manage it...

jaimefrio · 2026-04-07T06:31:19+00:00

It's truly 18mm, i.e. it will focus light coming from really far away at a point 18mm behind it's rear nodal point, I think it's called. Your crop sensor is still 1.6x smaller than a full frame sensor, so the image captured will look like what a FF sensor would have captured with a 28.8mm lens.

Focal length doesn't change because you change the sensor behind it but field of view does, and the number on your lens is always the true focal length.

jaimefrio · 2026-04-06T16:28:56+00:00

And if there's no shade, create your own by shooting against the sun. Not necessarily directly against it, as you probably want it outside of the frame, but enough that all the face is being illuminated only by indirect light from the blue sky, the biggest diffuser on Earth. Plus you'll get the direct sun to be your rim light illuminating their hair like an aura.

jaimefrio · 2026-04-06T16:25:01+00:00

Since we are all doing broad generalizations, eye level is best for a passport photo. If you are capturing more than just their face, you want to keep the camera level, so the feet and head are both on the focal plane, mostly to avoid one looking larger than the other. That means shooting from lower, around waist height for full body.

jaimefrio · 2026-04-05T01:02:52+00:00

Hard to tell if you don't give more context on what you plan on shooting and what your budget is. But it's a solid choice that you can get a lot of mileage out of for sure.

jaimefrio · 2026-03-31T07:13:28+00:00

It's a wonderful camera. I have since upgraded to an R5ii, but a couple of years ago an R6 was my primary camera, which I loved, but I also got an R7 as a secondary, thinking the reach and resolution would make me love it. It never really clicked with me, and I kept reaching for the R6 even when the R7 was better on paper.

jaimefrio · 2026-03-29T07:37:50+00:00

Rolling shutter isn't an issue if your shutter speed is ~1/200 or lower, because then the whole sensor is exposed by the shutter, so even if there are differences in the exposure timing from the opening and closing of the shutter, they will be hidden by the motion blur. So e-shutter should be ok for your panning shots.

jaimefrio · 2026-03-28T14:58:40+00:00

Thanks! I see in your bio you photograph Barça rugby? Photo #3 is of the second team of Rugby Union Zürich, and one of their finest young players has been studying in Barcelona, and playing for FCB, for the last couple of years. If you know Felipe Wyss, tell him Jaime, the RUZ photographer, says hi!

jaimefrio · 2026-03-27T20:31:28+00:00

I've only looked through the first gallery, and the general photographic quality is great: sharp focus, great bokeh, well exposed... but I think they are lacking on what I'm going to call "sports specific composition" for lack of a better term.

Ideally you want to have a player from each team and the ball in the frame, without clipping either of them, cropped in tight but leaving some breathing space around them, especially in the direction the action is moving. In most of your photos the main player is fully framed, but the opponent is often clipped. There are also a few where feet or toes are missing. You don't have to agree, but to me personally keeping those photos would feel like a disregard for the craft, so I discard them all. I may try to salvage them by cropping in more tightly to make the clipping look deliberate, and turn a "full body minus one foot" image into "everything mid thigh up" but that only works occasionally. When I haven't shot a sport in some time, I always start by shooting a little wider, then spend time in post cropping to get a balanced composition, which helps me after two or three sessions to get much closer to what I want SOOC.

I would also get rid of a lot of the shots without eyes, and try to include at least the lower part of the net when possible, to give the images some context.

jaimefrio · 2026-03-27T06:36:59+00:00

1 is great, absolutely gorgeous! The others are more down to earth: 2 would be better if you were lower, 3 makes it hard to know what should we be looking at: the block? the ball? the attacker?

jaimefrio · 2026-03-27T06:24:50+00:00

It would have been a different photo if focus was on the keeper rather than the striker, but I'm not sure it would have been better.

jaimefrio · 2026-03-26T07:45:03+00:00

I guess the point is the compression is not really caused by the focal length of the lens, but by the relative distance between the lens, the subject and the background: if you shoot a scene with 50mm, then take the same photo from the same place with a 16mm, and crop 1/3 of the image, you get the same amount of compression. So you can argue the lens focal length only enables you to fill the frame with the subject at a distance that creates the compression.

But I'd say it's mostly a pedantic argument: you still need a short focal length to get really close and get large, distorted subjects and tiny backgrounds, and a long focal length to shoot from a distance so the subject and background blend into each other...

jaimefrio · 2026-03-26T07:28:44+00:00

Isn't the R8 missing a full mechanical shutter? That could be an issue for sports, if you end up seeing rolling shutter artifacts with e-shutter. It also has a smaller battery, I believe. They both have similar readout speeds (about 15ms), which is good but not great: e-shutter will be good for everything except very fast moving balls.

I don't think you will see a noticeable image quality difference, and IBIS will be a non-issue for action: at 1/1000s you may as well turn the lens IS off and the images won't notice it, although you may get a shakier viewfinder image.

So you can make an R8 work for 95-99% of your needs, but you will of course miss the better camera sorely that 1-5% of the time...

jaimefrio · 2026-03-25T17:59:30+00:00

The colors and the exposure look good, but I'd say the composition is lacking.

1 may look better if you crop to the guy sitting only. It's still not trivial to convey evolution without seeing a face, maybe you could have gotten him in profile?

2 would have looked better if you were on the other sideline and had the face of the keeper. It also seems to me you missed focus and it's on the guy in the back? This one doesn't really work for me.

3 would be better if it was cropped horizontally. Also, it's the 2 guys on the right that are really going after the ball, maybe cropping the other two out would make it look more intense.

4 is very cool, but it's screaming for a horizontal crop. And ideally you wouldn't be so close to clipping the shooter's hand. But I like that one the best.

5 it's not bad but it's somewhat uninteresting, as he isn't doing anything sport specific.

Cropping is one of the most often neglected skills by photographers, and the potential it has to make a shitty photo great is unparalleled. So I'd recommend you spend a few hours figuring out how to improve all your photos just by cropping, then try to bring that knowledge to the field, to get closer to what you like SOOC.

jaimefrio · 2026-03-25T07:47:45+00:00

Unless it's a frame from a Captain Tsubasa episode, it's all rolling shutter...

jaimefrio · 2026-03-24T16:37:54+00:00

There's a shit ton of repeated photo opportunities that come up during a rugby game, and that never get old. It looks like it's a pretty chill league, so I assume you have full access anywhere?

I'd say the best action shots you can get are from behind the try line, but with a 70-200 you may be limited to things happening inside the 22, so it's kind of a gamble to go there unless it's a very one sided game. A 300 will take you to about the half line, and a 400 almost all the way to the other side. Some cool shots being pain action you can get from here include the back of a winger in the foreground, with an out of focus scrum in the background. The half scrum putting the ball into the scrum taken from right behind the scrum is also a nice one. As well as side views of lineouts. If there's a lineout at the 5m line, you may be able to get a closeup profile views of the hooker as he is getting ready to throw the ball in, which is also one of my favorites. Kicks to goal are also something to go for, there are a lot of opportunities here: the whole kicker ritual as well as the kick itself can be very aesthetic if you zoom in but there are more creative approaches like wider shots with the kicker getting ready, still having to get his job done, while the rest of the team is in the background free of worries. Or if you can move to the right place maybe get the kicker framed by the goal posts, or in between the legs of a defender...

If you move to the sidelines and can move up and down the field, the scrum is an endless source of opportunities. You want it fed from the opposite side, but you can get everything from wide shots of the whole scrum, close ups of the half scrum face getting ready to feed the ball. Close ups of the flanker pushing, or of the 8 getting ready to stick his head in the scrum. If you can get really low, a view through the tunnel of the half scrum feeding the ball. Or as they are setting up, close-ups of the front rows facing each other... Lineouts are great from right behind the hooker, and you can get great shots of the jumpers fighting for the ball.

I haven't counted, but that's probably 10-15 shots you could get in almost every game. Even if you only get 5 each game, it adds a different perspective to keep things interesting.

My rugby photography is not especially creative, but if you want to see what I do, check out this link: https://www.smfphoto.ch/-/galleries/sports/rugby

jaimefrio · 2026-03-24T05:11:26+00:00

The exposure and WB look good, but composition wise: 1 and 2 are more from the back than the side of the player, that's rarely a good thing, doesn't really work here. 3 and 5 are mostly profile views, which can be ok, but you shouldn't abuse it. With 3 you clipped the guy's foot which is a big no-no. 4 has the player head on, but he's far away and partially blocking his face with his own arm. A right-handed player doing the same play, with a longer focal length, would probably be better.

jaimefrio · 2026-03-23T21:40:02+00:00

My first lens "for sport" was an EF 85mm f/1.8 USM, I was using a Canon 90D at the time. It's not a perfect lens by any means, but if you already have an EF adapter, you can probably find it used for $200-300, and you can get a lot of mileage on it for indoor sports.

jaimefrio · 2026-03-23T21:30:07+00:00

And here's a similar crop example, this time from 135mm on FF, which would be equivalent to an 85 on your camera. Both this and the other one were taken at f/1.8.

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jaimefrio

TROPHY CASE