A standard, tournament ping pong ball is 40mm in diameter.
This shot was taken with the camera on a tripod, manually focused to the distance of the ball, which was then raised by Logan, a ping pong club member who volunteered to assist me. In the background in a striking attack pose is Bogdan, amateur photographer, co-worker, and friend, who has taught me much of what I know about ping pong and who swaps notes with me about photography.
I borrowed his 580EX flash for this shot, placed on the ground in slave mode, deactivated the firing of the flash on the camera, placed the flash to fire at 45 degrees upwards aimed at the bottom of the table and let the splash illuminate the ball. (As a side note, I originally thought this was a mistake of placement, but then every shot I took with the flash pulled back farther to actually strike the ball directly resulted in blown highlights.)
Post-processing:
1) Import from RAW, boosting shadows and contrast severely
2) Crop
3) Noise Ninja
4) Sharpen
5) Color Balance adjustment to cool the image slightly
6) Resize
7) Export
Statistics
Place: 281 out of 492 Avg (all users): 5.0836 Avg (commenters): 5.6667 Avg (participants): 5.0105 Avg (non-participants): 5.1657 Views since voting: 1298 Views during voting: 462 Votes: 359 Comments: 25 Favorites: 1 (view)
Very cool shot! I remember this well from the challenge and scored it a 7. Love the light on the ball - and am appreciative of the fact that you shared how you captured it! :-)
Thanks, John. I chose that subject and idea with great deliberation and great hopes, however. That's a tense action shot, since a ball bouncing that high is about to get clobbered. :)
This photo is a good example of execution of an interesting technique. I think you did that part well, and it was probably difficult to achieve. Practicing and learning controlled environment techniques is very important in the greater scheme of things. It will teach you a lot. However, the best technique in the world doesn't create great photographs all the time. You choice of subject and idea still plays an important role. I believe this photo suffered that fate in the challenge. The viewer wasn't interested in what you were showing.
Better luck next time and keep up the good work :)
I think that this would have been a stronger image if the background was more visible. Using DOF rather than brightness to render this minimalistic would have improved the composition.
I like the idea, you've stoped the ping-pong ball in midair nicely too. But the thing that lets the rest of the photo down is the lighting on the table and on the person's arm. I think even though the challenge is minamilism, the DOF you've used would make the abll the emphasis of the photo, even if everything was equally lit. Dave
Took me a minute to see everything going on in this image, very interesting, I would like to know when the challenge is over how you accomplished this one, Nicely done!
more backlighting would have provided more interest here i think. it took me a minute to figure out what was going on, then i made out the ping pong paddle, net and arm in the background...but it isn't easy to see (at least on my monitor)
had to really look at this before I could figure out it was table tennis. The focus beening on the ball and making the background dark, is a good imagin..
Nice lighting on the ping pong ball to really bring it out. However the detail feels much greater on the left than on the right. Be nice if the net had a little bit more detail
Great concept and amazing job getting the ball in focus. I think this would be better, though, if the table and player were better lit (still out of focus, but better able to discern what they were).
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