Knee Pads and Blue Filters

Knee Pads

Knee Pads

The parents of American middle school teenagers spend a lot of time waiting: waiting in traffic lines to drop the kids off at school, waiting to pick them up after the school dance, waiting between matches at tournaments. Last night was the first dance of the school year, today was the first sports tournament – volleyball.

Modern middle school gyms do not, at first sight, provide many opportunities for art photography and I did not even look through the viewfinder for the first four hours of the day. Capturing sports action is not a talent I posses. The best sports photographers must really understand the game they are documenting and anticipate the action – I had two left feet and three left arms growing up, I have no such aptitude.

Then I started to notice the feet and the reflections from the gym floor. Feet are anonymous but still signal the presence of a whole human; feet speak of where the person is headed and where they have been. Joining the feet were reflections of the players and referees in the gym floor. And lines, lots of lines to mark what the players can and can’t do; where the feet may and may not fall. Now that is something to make art about.

This row of knee pads, sitting on the team bench, is the image I like best from the day. The reflection of the white socks off the floor caught my attention, and the large number of them made a change from my normal addiction to pictures of isolated individuals.

A modern SLR (Nikon D300) allowed the use of ISO 1600 without too much noise in the artificial light but the colors are not so interesting – white socks and pads reflecting off a yellow wood floor offer much less contrast than my mind perceived. Without contrast the subject of this photograph draws too little attention – Photoshop and a blue filter were the solution, with Georgia O’Keefe as the expert witness called to justify their use:

Nothing is less real than realism… Details are confusing. It is only by selection,
by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Photoshop CS3 has made the rendering of black and white images with a range of color filters much simpler than earlier versions. The yellow floor is reduced to near blacks by the selection of a blue filter and tweeking the levels. Now the row of legs, pads and their reflections command attention.

But what is the real meaning of these things? What would Georgia say to that?

Actually she might have quite a lot to say; that there are girls competing in a school sports tournament at all might have pleased her considerably, this is Title IX at work. Figuratively, we could all use knee pads in our lives but knowing that these are middle schoolers we might agree to let them hold on to the protection for they are perhaps passing through the hardest stage of life.

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  1. Mike Broadway - PhotoBlog » Blog Archive » Timeout:

    […] volleyball tournament; the last of this middle school season. As with the earlier tournament (see Knee Pads and Blue Filters) my photographic focus was on the feet – no parent wants a stranger pointing a telephoto lens at […]