03/26/2026
Club member Josh Groves recently shared his experience and process with us:
“My sons and their dojo took part in the 2026 AAU Ohio District Championship in Cincinnati this past weekend. We only had five participants for this event, so I decided I'd try to get some pics for all of them -- that being said, I have a new found respect for sports photographers!
Over the course of 5 hours, I took over 1800 shots -- mostly in burst mode trying to catch action shots -- and I learned a lot in the process.
1. In this particular situation, I took the wrong lenses with me.
I had planned for us to mostly be in the bleachers, so I brought my 55-300mm telescopic lens and my 50mm as my backup. It ends up I pretty much had free reign to get anywhere I wanted for shots, so I relied completely on the 50mm. The 50mm worked great, but I really had to work to get in position for some angles and missed other opportunities completely where the 35mm would have been better.
2. After I got my settings in place, I turned off my previews completely.
I was shooting with a Nikon D5200 which has been a great camera for me as a hobbyist, but the cache fills up pretty quick when you're shooting in burst mode. Part of the problem that the camera was encountering was not only was it trying to save all of the shots in RAW format at once (a fast writing SD card helps), but it was also rendering the images to the preview after I let off the trigger. Turning off the previews allowed me to take a longer burst at full speed and catch more action shots. My favorite shot of the entire day was of our female fighter caught mid-air ready to pounce on her unprepared opponent while the ref was trying to avert disaster -- you could really feel her murder-pixie/Super Saiyan energy!
3. I used the elements in and around the ring -- including the referees -- to create framing, leading lines, and depth.
The tips that Josh gave us on the sheet in the last club meeting were great, and it really helped me when approaching the tournament after observing how the refs would stand apart so they could see kata (choreographed forms) or kumite (sparring) from all angles. I could get in the right angle to see right where the action would be in most cases. I also made use of the flags they were using to rope off the rings and the floor mats for foreground to provide depths in a few instances.
4. Getting at the same level as our dojo's students really gave me a different perspective
Almost all of the photos I kept were taken either kneeling on the floor or lower, and it really gave some dramatic shots in some cases that wouldn't properly be represented from a position in the stands. It was neat seeing the referees towering over the scene and how really intimidating a three and a half foot tall warrior can actually be.
5. Due to the subject of my photos, and the sheer number of them, I had to change my culling process significantly.
Normally when I've gone on walks or gone bird watching, I'll end up with, at most, a couple of hundred shots and then cull it down by about 90% when I get the chance which may be in several days or longer. When I get back from wherever I've gone, I'll load stick my SD card into a slot on my Synology, press a button, and it dumps all of my pictures into storage to worry about later, then I can format my card and move onto the next thing. Later, I would pull up the photos on my laptop, find the interesting ones, move keepers into a sub-folder, and delete the rest.
This time I had over 1800 shots, and I had to make sure there were an appropriate number of pictures of each participant. Whenever I tried to retrieve the photos from the network drive, the lag I encountered while reviewing was driving me crazy -- it really added up while I was switching between the massive amount of filler shots while I was trying to find the ones worth keeping. I ended up mounting the SD card in the laptop itself. I still had the network drive as backup, but I was able to review the photos much faster this way. I'm using ON1 RAW as my photo editor, and it will group up similar shots and allow me to assign stars, so in the first pass, I assigned one, three, or five stars to each photo. After I deleted the one stars in the first pass, I moved the remaining threes and fives directly to the laptop's internal storage so I could work with them more efficiently and continued to whittle down from there. I ended up with 69 shots in the final album that I sent to the dojo's Facebook group.
6. I got to learn a lot more about my post-processing tool.
I watched a lot of reviews about different editing tools and tried out several trying to figure out which one was right for me. I was really trying to avoid Lightroom because I can't justify paying another monthly fee, especially since I'm just a hobbyist. I liked ON1 because it seemed to have most of the features that makes Lightroom so great and the noise removal was supposed to be really good. Up to this point, I had used ON1 just for noise removal and pre-made filter application, so this was the first time that I got to use more of its advanced tools to adjust the light and color levels, apply masks, and use some of the tools in its AI suite. Over the course of two long nights, I watched and read a host of tutorials on the app itself and photo editing theory, learned a lot by trial and error, and drank way too much caffeine, but by Monday morning, I was able to deliver something that my audience and I were both pretty happy with.
7. I came up with a pretty good workflow that worked for me that I'm going to use going forward.There were two things that were helpful for me to batch process at the beginning in this specific situation: denoise (more on this later) and applying white balance. I applied the denoise tool at the same rate across the board and came back to tweak in specific circumstances later. White balance was easy in this specific situation because they were all wearing white karate uniforms, so I knew what pure white was supposed to be (I didn't realize how important white balance was until recently and, up until this weekend, had been manually adjusting the color temperature IN EVERY PHOTO). At this point, I'd crop the photo, reduce the saturation to 0, and adjust the light levels. When I was happy with it, I'd reintroduce SOME of the saturation and then add some vibrance which I didn't have a good handle on until now. This allowed me to really capture the reflected light which was really apparent on the uniforms being reflected by the sparring mats. I'll admit that reflection may not be to everyone's taste, but I really felt that it added some energy to the scenes. After this step, I'd consider masks and effects. In most cases I would apply a mask to the background to darken it slightly so the subject would stand out more (ON1's background selection tool was amazing for this) then adjust the opacity rather than the exposure so that it would blend in more cleanly. The other effect I liked in most cases was a light vignette to draw the eyes inward.
8. The denoise and sharpening tools shouldn't just be applied blindly, and why I learned to love some noise
I noticed as I got toward (what I thought was) the end that there were some artifacts appearing in some of the kids' faces whenever I'd zoom in on the JPEG I was exporting, I went back and realized that the denoise tool was also applying a sharpening effect that worked in some cases where I was close to the subject, but was causing a lot of havoc in cropped photos. After removing this effect from most of the photos, I also went back and started reintroducing slight noise levels. In drawing and painting, one thing I've learned is that you need to pick and choose which elements need to be there in order to support the composition, which can just plain be left out, and which can just be suggested to the viewer. That lesson really hit me hard which is why I reintroduced some noise in order to soften some aspects of the image, especially for zoomed in faces. Part of me really hates that you can't zoom in x100 to see what's being reflected in to each of the fighter's eyes, but I'm also accepting of the fact that this adds to the overall composition.”
Great shots Josh, and fantastic write-up! Thanks for sharing!
