About

This website isn’t really how I wanted it to look or turn out. I have plans and ideas, but getting them all coded and designed takes a lot of time.

Right now, with volleyball season in full swing, I seem to be spending most of my time editing videos and processing photos. I have written some software to help me edit the videos with automation and help process the photos, and I have more in the works that will take priority over the website. Right now, for each game, I am spending about 3 hours processing the videos and photos.

I am getting faster at processing, and I’m getting better at taking photos I know will be keepers. I’m scrapping about 90% of the photos I take. This is for various reasons, such as the person's face being blocked by another player. Sometimes when I press the focus button, I don’t click on the right person and instead get a nice photo of Whitney’s mother and grandma sitting in the stands instead of the player diving for the ball, spiking, or making an amazing block.

I’m also shooting in what I call "Machine Gun Mode". So when I press the shutter button, I’m not taking 1 photo, I’m taking about 10 photos rapidly. This helps because I don’t have to time my shots perfectly and it gives me options to pick the best one. But that is just the thing, picking the best one takes time.

So because I’m spending so much time on the photos and videos of the games, the main page has just been thrown together quickly in Dreamweaver because it came with my Adobe subscription. The photo galleries are made from Lightroom Classic using a web gallery tool built into it. I have ideas to create my own automation and web app to display my work, but that will have to wait until after volleyball season is over.

I am new to photography. I just bought my camera in July of 2026, and it wasn’t for sports. It was actually for taking night photos of the Milky Way. While I have had a DSLR camera for a while, I never really got into photography until I got my Nikon Z6 III in July. Since then, I’ve studied the mechanics of the camera and how settings such as ISO, exposure, autofocus, shutter speed, aperture, and light all work together.

Having a very expensive camera will take great photos of almost anything standing still. If you want to take photographs of people posing, you’re going to look like a pro because the cameras these days can make just about any photograph you take look amazing. But when you get into nighttime photography, where you use a slow shutter speed to gather as much light as possible, you can’t just point and click.

The same is true for volleyball. You can try and put your camera on auto, but when the players and ball are moving fast, I’m not sure the blur you get because your shutter speed was too slow will give your photographs that professional look.

I have discovered that volleyball photography is more challenging than astrophotography in many ways. While sure, I don’t have to worry about getting eaten by bears or mosquitoes, or having the pet you bring along (my cat Chloe) get dragged away by coyotes or wolves, I have to deal with people. Which sometimes could be worse.

When I take a time lapse of the Milky Way, it’s all about the details of the setup. Finding the spot, getting the shot set up, and getting your camera programmed to take photos throughout the night. Then after that, I pretty much go on guard duty. Keeping an eye on the camera and basically camping in a van throughout the night.

With volleyball, I have to check my camera settings for each new gym. I’m trying to get the fastest shutter speed with the lowest ISO value I can based on how good the lighting is in that gym. This allows me to get the cleanest photos with the least amount of graininess (noise).

I am getting better. As you look through my photos and videos, I hope you will see my progress as I develop too. With my first photos, my shutter speed was really fast and I needed a really high ISO to compensate for the lack of light. While I got really great photos from a distance, any zooming in resulted in a lot of noise. Lightroom has a denoising feature, but it doesn’t completely restore the detail lost from shooting at a high ISO.

Later on, I got better at shooting at a slightly slower shutter speed with a lower ISO, where using the denoising feature probably wasn’t even needed.

So, I am glad you are here looking at my page and looking at my work.

If you’re a Sobo player, I’m doing this for you.

I hope the memories of your time at South Beloit High School are something you will treasure forever, and I hope these photographs help keep those memories as vivid as they can be as you age and progress through life.

I hope someday you will show them to your children and inspire them to play the game.

And when that day happens, I hope there is someone like me to capture the moment and take the time to process the photos.