Team 2809 takes on the Canadian FIRST Robotics Regional

Team 2809

For the past few months I have been volunteering my time to help a high school in Kingston, Ontario learn how to build competitive robots for the FIRST Robotics Competition. KCVI, a local school, got in touch with Queen's Engineering student Jonathan Norris this past fall and decided to start a FIRST team, K-Botics. Because I have worked with the FIRST Robotics competition in the past (team 610, Crescent Robotics), I figured I would lend what help I could to this rookie team.

The way that this competition works is that in January teams are given a short description of a new challenge game, a standard kit of parts and six weeks with which to design and build a competitive robot.

Once the robots are built, they are sent away from the teams and stored until the teams compete in regional based competitions. My team chose to compete in the Greater Toronto Regional (GTR), which happened over March 26-28th.

Controls Setup

The regional competitions follow a standard format. The first day is for practice rounds so that teams can get accustomed to the playing field, and work on strategy. Next is a qualification day where teams compete in seeding matches. A final day is dedicated to elimination matches to determine the winning teams.

Organized Chaos

As a photographer I was charged with the task of covering the event and making sure that all of the most important moments would be captured for those unable to travel with the team. I spent most of my time between three locations; in the pits, the stands, and of course on field level.

Blinded by the Light

Location Concerns and Technique
Covering an event like this is pretty challenging. You need to be able to get both the action of the sports being carried out on the field and also capture the team spirit throughout the competition off of the field. These are two fundamentally different types of photography and each require different styles of shooting.

K-Bot, Mark I

The important thing to understand about the action shots is that there are two very well defined lighting zones on the field level; the field, lit by high intensity stadium lights, and the operator and judging stations located around the field which lit only by ambient room light. As I alluded to earlier, these are dramatically different lighting zones to cover and this makes metering a real pain in the ass. I did my best to meter so that the playing field was properly exposed, and the shadow areas (operator boxes and judges) were tamed using on-axis fill (flash attached to camera body).


My camera settings around the field were generally aperture priority or manual. Using aperture priority it was easier to manage DOF (depth of field) without thinking about the metering implications, and when on manual I knew exactly what I would be able to get away with, exposure wise. The flash I was using was set on ETTL and although there are many who would balk at this, I was able to make sure that the flash was set for the scene I was in, and either under expose flash (to tame highlights) or bring the power of the flash up over the ambient (when metering over the field).

Walking around in the pits and throughout the stands, the techniques used were far different. As for lighting the people scene, usually I left the camera in manual mode, with the ambient scene underexposed by a stop or so and then filled the person in the scene with diffused on-axis flash (ETTL +1). I was able to leave the settings this way because the lighting inside the pit areas was constant, and the only lighting variable that was changing was the distance to subject and the ETTL system took care of this easily, making sure that the subjects looked good :). Lastly, I usually only needed to change settings on the camera if I wanted to change the DOF, for example if I wanted greater DOF, I would open the aperture one stop, and lengthen the shutter speed by one stop.

If Eight was Nine

One thing to keep in mind is that when hand holding, make sure you keep your shutter speed above 1/60 at a minimum, or else you are going to have blurred pictures, no matter what. Either the subject moves or (more likely) you do.

Equipment
When travelling to a new location where you have no clue what the light will be like... you bring the kitchen sink. Well, sort of. I brought what equipment I had (three lenses, flash, Gary Fong modifier....) and borrowed a monopod and a ball head for it.

Jubilation

I shot the action of the competition from field level with my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, 580exII and gary fong attached. From the stands I shot mostly with the 70-200 and bare flash head (which lit the crowd around the field). I used the monopod in both of these situations and it allowed me to remain stable while at the same time using lower shutter speeds. Further, I was able get some pictures where the robots are in motion and the operators were static.

Stop Motion

In the pits, I had my 50mm f/1.8 lens, and a Gary Fong on my flash. I personally hate on-axis bare flashes because they kill all of the 3d shading in a photo. If I had a RRS (really right stuff) flash L-Bracket I would be able to shoot slightly off axis, but alas, I do not. I'm happy with what turned out, so I'm not complaining too much :)

Team 2809
The competition itself was really fun. The team qualified well and managed to get up into 2nd place at one point during the qualification matches! During the elimination round the K-Bots managed to make it to the quarter finals, and it was a electrifying set of matches! However, as FIRST is more about learning and community outreach than robots competing the K-Bots were really going for another award, the Rookie All-Star.

The rookie all-star award, which is even more important than the winning of a regional event, celebrates teams that have the greatest amount of community outreach and sustainable stratagies in their rookie year. The K-Bots were able to win this award by a wide margin. The award was well deserved as the team put forth a very serious and dedicated effort in their first year. Winning this prestigious award now makes the team eligible for the World Championship held in Atlanta next week.

Well Deserved

Once I returned home I was faced with the daunting task of post processing the 2000 (16gb) photos down to about a hundred from each day. What a pain! The post processing was done in Lightroom 2.3 and by using a specific workflow I was able to (eventually) produce ranked photos to give to the team in multiple formats (jpeg for web, TIFF for printing).
My workflow for processing worked well for me, and I will be writing a post to go over the steps that I usually take.

The GTR event was a real joy to cover and yielded some fantastic photos.
Good Luck K-Botics!!!!

Point!
Image Credit: Jason Sadler



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