Maxwell Kruger Photography

This weekend was Penn State’s annual spring football game, the Blue White game. I used it as a testing event for some remote cameras that I’m going to do in the future for real football games.

I’ve been working to get some cameras on the top of the Bryce Jordan Center. I went up a couple of times last week to figure out the logistics and where I would place the cameras. I was going to do two different focal lengths at different parts of the building. At the last minute, I decided it would be cool to do two cameras with the same focal length pointing in opposite directions to later stitch together and make a panoramic image of people tailgating. I borrowed my friend’s D300 with a 10mm lens to use as the other camera to complement my 5D with the 17mm lens. Since the D300 isn’t full frame, it comes out to be 15mm, roughly equivalent to the 5D’s 17.

I went up a couple hours before the game to set the cameras up. More about that in another post.

Here are some good ones from the game.

(Canon 5D Mark II & NIKON D300 stitched together) – click on the image to see a higher res version.

(Canon 1D Mark II, 300mm, 1/400, f/9, ISO 200)

(Canon 1D Mark II, 300mm, 1/2000, f/4, ISO 200)

(Canon 1D Mark II, 300mm, 1/1250, f/4, ISO 200)

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My friend, Amy, and I traveled to Bellefonte last week to shoot some photos. We had a good time although the weather wasn’t great. It was overcast and rainy most of the time and we eventually had to leave because the rain started picking up. Although I love shooting in blue or partially cloudy skies, the overcast sky helped me fight the sun with my little flash. If the sun had been out in full force, it would have been much more challenging to get enough power out of the small flash to combat the power of the sun.

Here are a few from the shoot. I shot most of these images with my 5D Mark II lit with a 580ex II through a Lastolite Ezybox softbox. I’d like to get monobloc with a bigger softbox so I can have it further away from the subject. Overall, pretty successful shoot, though.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 50mm, 1/200, f/8, ISO 400)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 50mm, 1/200, f/11, ISO 400)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/200, f/6.3, ISO 400)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 50mm, 1/200, f/8, ISO 400)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/250, f/10, ISO 400)

I am putting some cameras up on top of the Bryce Jordan Center for this weekend’s Blue White game. I was up there yesterday scouting locations – pretty cool!

Thanks to Scott for getting me access.

Update: For those who don’t know what the Bryce Jordan Center is, here is a shot from when I flew over the Penn State campus on a photo assignment last year. The building is circled and I am standing between the air handlers where the X is. The above photo was taken facing the stadium, and you can catch the corner of it beside the right air handler.

Jeffrey Field is one of the ugliest places on campus to shoot sports. The backgrounds are horrible; I think it’s on purpose. There is always something extremely ugly and distracting in the back of all shots. The entire field is surrounded pretty closely with something, making it hard to eliminate it with a shallow depth of field. Long lenses definitely help, but it’s also hard to afford a 600…I’m shooting with a 300. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get a 400 2.8 this summer which will be versatile and can be used as a 560 f/4 with a 1.4x teleconverter.

(Canon 1D Mark II, 300mm, 1/2500, f/4, ISO 400)

(Canon 1D Mark II, 300mm, 1/2500, f/4, ISO 400)

(Canon 1D Mark II, 300mm, 1/4000, f/4, ISO 400)

(Canon 1D Mark II, 300mm, 1/5000, f/4, ISO 400)

These dogs seemed to be having so much fun at the park the other day.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/1600, f/4, ISO 400)

I shot PSU baseball today against Ohio State. I’ve always thought it would be cool to get the ball in focus and the pitcher out of focus. I’ve tried to achieve this the last couple of games to no avail. It takes a lot of tweaking on the focus and where you sit to line it up perfectly. A longer lens definitely helps to give you more play in the focus.

(Canon 1D Mark II, 420mm, 1/1000, f/5.6, ISO 1000)

As promised, I finished the videos for THON 09. Above is the one combining two different angles. One angle is from the catwalks and one is from my a camera attached to the bottom of the BJC scoreboard.

For the wide angle of the video, I used an old Canon S500 point and shoot camera connected to a laptop on the catwalks of the BJC. The camera was controlled by a piece of software called GBTimelapse which told the camera to take a picture every 30 seconds and download it onto the computer’s harddrive.

Since I didn’t have the luxury of space to fit a laptop on the scoreboard, I connected my Canon 1D Mark II camera to the bottom of the scoreboard with a Magic Arm and controlled it with an intervalometer to take a picture each minute (because I was worried that I’d fill up the memory card). You can see the scoreboard going down and up in the video – this is when I set up the camera.

Here are links to the individual cameras videos.
Wide Camera
Overhead Camera

Hit the jump to see photos of the setup.

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This year, I covered THON in a unique way: from the catwalks. I worked with some folks at the BJC to get some cameras up into the catwalks above. I’ve been placing remote cameras up there for basketball games, so this was not much different, other than the amount of cameras I used.

In total, I covered THON with a total of 6 cameras, all doing totally different things. I had two cameras hooked up in the catwalks as straight remotes; one with a fisheye to cover the entire arena, and one with a 70-200 pointed directly down to get a tight overhead shot. I also had two handheld cameras that I used when I walked around the floor. The next two cameras are the cool ones.

On the Thursday before THON, I set up a camera connected to a borrowed friend’s laptop to record a timelapse of the entire thing, starting at the end of the basketball game that Thursday night to load out on Sunday evening.  The computer was scheduled to take a photo  every 30 seconds for the entire period to be later strung into a movie.  The next day after the basketball game, on Friday before THON started, we were able to lower the scoreboard and attach a camera to the bottom with my 17mm lens.  Since the scoreboard is directly centered in the arena, I figured it would get really cool shots from above with a wide angle lens.  I couldn’t attach a laptop to the camera, so I used an intervalometer (TC-80N3) to record a photo every minute. 

The final sit down at the end of the 46 hours

Here are the two individual camera angles separated.