Eight session. The one where I forget how to position myself when shooting
Finally a day without strong wind. Last time’s success led me to enthusiastically drive to the football field for what I thought would result in a lot of quality data.
When I arrived, the sun was shining and in order to get it in front of the canvas, I set up everything in a different goal than usual. I also set up the camera on the right side according to a previous post, immediately realizing that it was much more in the way there if shooting left-handed.
After a few initial practice shots, I felt this is going well and started the cameras. At which point I forgot everything technique wise, resulting in a quite frustrating session where I had a lot of trouble getting the pucks off the ground.
After a lot of unsuccessful attempts, I realized that I had positioned myself too far forward compared to the puck and and when that wasn’t working, I tried to correct it by moving even more forward. After just two weeks of not being able to practice on account of weather, I had forgotten how to shoot and did not really find my way back.
That it started to rain did not help either. Surprisingly, the water underneath the pucks, together with the very slick surface on the ice-like board, formed a vacuum (I assume) and made the pucks stick. I tried switching to the other, dry, side of the ice when it stopped raining but that surface, never having been used, had so little friction that the pucks slid off the board before taking off in the air. Again, I really should have bought a bigger board as that would likely have been more forgiving in terms of lack of technique.
On the upside, I managed to get a shot or two with the sun shining directly at the canvas, creating a lot of shine. The intense brightness could definitely cause problems for the camera.
A number of thoughts going forward:
- I will likely have to accept the camera always being positioned on the opposite side of the player (or it will have to be placed more at an angle, with other forms of error as a result).
- I will continue using autofocus and autoexposure and deal with the problem of a frame potentially having very different characteristics than the frame before.
- Due to me often shooting without much force and with little precision, the project problem is likely made much more difficult than need be. One idea is to reclassify all hits as not only hit/miss but hit/weak/miss, where weak would be most shots that have bounced on the grass before hitting the canvas. These shots are not representative of the hits I want to find as their hit positions provide little value as training data since the pucks bounce so randomly. The number of bounces per round, etc. may be useful to track though.
- I used some stabilizing plastic pipes on the top part of the canvas this time and I think that was useful for avoiding the canvas sliding toward the middle, introducing waves/wrinkles.