Break!
by
wingyComment by wingy: Well, for someone with a 5.3 average score and previous high score of a 6.5 this is pretty awesome to have a first place shot with such a wild score. Thank you everyone for your comments (whether I marked them helpful or not, they were all appreciated).
Several people have asked about how this was done so I'll explain a little bit more than I did in my original comments. As I said I used a tripod with a timer and a 1.6 sec shutter speed. The table is a black felt table and I burned out everything in the background to minimize clutter and give it a crisp locationless feel.
The lighting is afternoon sunlight from one basement window off to the left of this shot. I didn't use any flash; the solid image of the balls in the rack is just from them being there for about half of the shutter length, and the black table not reflecting enough light to show through beneath them onced they moved. If you look closely at the 8 ball, you can see that the racking dot on the table did show through. It is because of the single light source that the glare on the balls produced the sharp lines showing where they traveled. I actually was walking through my basement one day and saw how the light from that window made the pool table look really intersting, so I grabbed my (sister's) camera and my tripod, since the light was way too low for handheld shots, and started shooting still life shots of it. Then I decided to have some fun and tried capturing a break. And when I saw how cool that one shot turned out I ended up spending an hour or so messing around with it trying to get everything just right.
I do slightly regret having moved after I shot the break. I didn't think about it at the time.
One thing that a number of people mentioned was that including the whole table might have been I good idea. I'd thought about it, and I appreciate people offering their thoughts for improvements, but in the end I stand by my decision to frame it as I did. In order to maintain the angle I used here, to include the entire table it would have had to be a panoramic shot, and the focus and action of the shot would have taken up significantly less of the overall shot. I also don't know if that would have been physically possible since there is a wall about the length of a pool cue away from the table, and I don't think I could have gotten wide enough to include everything. I could have also raised the camera up a bunch and switched to a vertical composition in order to fit the entire table in, but doing so would have turned the shot into a more clinical look from above at how the pool balls moved instead of a closer more involved perspective, which is what I wanted. The closer I could be the more impact I figured the shot would have, so I tried to get as close as possible while maintaining as much context of the table as possible, and I think this angle and zoom enabled a strong balance of the two.
As a fun side note, a 24x36 print of this is going on the wall by our pool table in our newly finished basement.
Photographer found comment helpful.