May 22, 2013

Put the Pedal Down

JR Hildebrand

Photo of the Day

Last year I went to Indy a couple of days before the big race to see some of the sights of Carb Day. This year I will be out of town, but it is still one of my favorite events of the year. You get a small glimpse of what the Indy 500 is all about without all of the people. You can also get up close and personal with the racers. Last year I did just that while JR Hildebrand was being interviewed on the Chevy stage. JR was the reigning rookie of the year for the Indianapolis 500, and some thought that he might just have a shot at winning it. He finished 14th in that race, and he will start 10th in this years race. I thought that it would be interesting to try and get a couple of shots of the driver, but after taking a couple I was moved aside. At any rate this was my first attempt at covering a sort of news conference. With the race coming up this weekend I thought that it would be a good time to share the picture.

Technical Data

This was a case of trying to adjust a few of the sliders in Lightroom to get the picture just right. In the end I really think that the original was pretty good. Sometimes I try and do too much in post processing. This weekend in California I will try to do a limited amount in editing. Although a couple of HDR shots would be nice.

About these ads

Posted by on May 22, 2013 in Canon 18-135mm Kit, Canon 60D, Indianapolis, Lightroom, Racing and tagged , , .

Leave a Comment

May 21, 2013

The Candy Man Can

candy man

Photo of the Day

Before we went to the graduation at Valpo Sunday we stopped off at the Albanese Candy Factory in Merrillville, Indiana. For years I had seen a house built into what appeared to be a factory. There where no signs then though to say what it was. Now the exterior of the house has been fixed up, and it is a full blown destination. I liked some of the decorations around the shop, and with a new lens in hand I may have overshot the interior of the building. I did take time to set this shot up though. I waited until an employee came over to get some chocolate out of a bin. It gave the person on the swing something to look at, and I think made the picture. I may have more from the candy store in the next couple of days. This is a really cool shop that has something for every candy lover including a 40 foot tall chocolate fondue fountain.

Technical Data

As with yesterday’s picture this one was shot with the 24-70mm lens as well. The high aperture really helps blur the background giving me the look that I want. Right now I don’t want to carry a bunch of prime lenses around so this along with my 70-200mm lens gives me great coverage in the L series glass. In Lightroom I didn’t do a whole lot here. I tried to get it right in the store. I did bump up the highlights a bit as well as add some vibrance. I did something new though, and turned the clarity down. I usually like the clarity up, but I liked the way that it melted away the background even more turned down a bit. In all this was an easy picture to process.

Posted by on May 21, 2013 in Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L, Canon 60D, Food & Drink, Lightroom, Merrillville and tagged , , .

2 Comments

May 20, 2013

A Glimpse to the Future

sky and stella

Photo of the Day

Yesterday we went up to Valparaiso, Indiana to see a couple of relatives at the Valparaiso University commencement ceremonies. There was a moment during the photo taking that Stella decided to wear the cap and gown. Her cousin whom it belonged to came over to help her out. What followed was a very spontaneous moment that I was happy to capture. These little moments are why I love photography so much.

Technical Data

This shot was taken with my new 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. This is a portrait lens that I was very excited to try out. I bought it used the day before knowing that it was a glaring hole in my collection. This portrait lens will come in handy very quickly as I have a couple of shoots coming up. I really enjoyed using the lens, and I think that I made some great pictures with it yesterday. When I imported this photo into Lightroom I knew that I had to do a couple of things to it. I exposed for the faces, but that left the sky a bit flat. I increased the exposure a half stop to bring the sky out more, and then used the shadows slider to bring the faces back in. I was much happier with this result. I had thought about cloning out the buildings on either side at the bottom, but then if you are looking at them my job was not done well. I think the subjects do enough to draw you in that you do not need to clone anything out.

Posted by on May 20, 2013 in Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L, Canon 60D, Lightroom, Valparaiso and tagged , , .

Leave a Comment

May 19, 2013

Looking It In

josh estill-2

Photo of the Day

Yesterday I was at the final Purdue baseball game of the season. This has been a great spring covering this team. They have not had the season that they would have liked, but the potential is there. They lost a ton of talent from a team that won the Big Ten last season. After taking pictures at most of the home games I already had pictures enough of most of the players. I was not covering the last weekend for anything but my own fun. I was trying some things for the future. I decided to try and stop the baseball just outside of the catchers mitt. You can get a blurred ball at a low shutter speed, but I cranked up the shutter speed to stop the ball. What I couldn’t predict was an outside pitch that the catcher had to reach for. It ended up being a picture that I liked because it was different than anything else that I had shot up to this point.

Technical Data

I took this picture with my 70-200mm lens on the camera with the 1.4x extender attached to it. On my crop frame camera that means that I am shooting at about 448mm. I still cropped in a little here to get rid of the distracting batter. I applied my baseball preset when II ported the pictures into Lightroom. The preset just punches things up a bit for me. That was the end of the adjustments.

Posted by on May 19, 2013 in Canon 60D, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L II, Canon EF 1.4x II, College Baseball, Lightroom, Lightroom Presets, Purdue, Sports, Uncategorized, West Lafayette/Lafayette and tagged , .

Leave a Comment

May 18, 2013

The Butterfly Garden

butterfly gardens

Photo of the Day

I took this picture a couple of weekends ago while we were at the Indianapolis Zoo. I liked this garden in full bloom along with the housing for the butterflies in the background. When I took the picture though I knew that the sky was suspect. It really did not add anything to the picture, in fact it took away from it. I thought that it might look okay in black and white, and I was right. I would have loved to have had a better sky to show off the true beauty of the garden, but sometimes you have to take what you can get.

Technical Data

I shot three frames in order to make a killer HDR shot here. The sky never looked right though so after making the 32 bit file in Photomatix I imported it back into Lightroom to work on it a bit. In Lightroom I used Matt Kloskowski’s HDR in Black and White preset to start this image off. I adjusted the exposure and the highlights as well. That was the end of my editing here. A bit more than I have been used to working with sports images lately, but still a lot of fun.

Posted by on May 18, 2013 in Canon 60D, Flowers, HDR, Indianapolis, Lightroom, Lightroom Presets, Photomatix Pro, Tamron 10-24mm, Zoo and tagged , .

Leave a Comment

May 17, 2013

The Pitching Motion

robert ramer blur

Photo of the Day

Last night I returned to shooting baseball. A week ago today I suffered two fractures around my left eye which is the eye that I shoot with. I have been practicing switching over the last few weeks so that I can watch the pitcher with the left eye while on the third base line. That training came in handy last night. I spent most of my time on the third base side so that I could look through the camera with my left eye. Purdue pitcher Robert Ramer had a great night pitching for the last time as a Boilermaker. He went 10 2/3 innings giving up only two runs. As a photographer though the same pitcher for any length of time can get boring. I decided to try something new in the later innings. I kept taking my shutter speed lower and lower until I was down to 1/30th of a second. I then panned with Robert to see what I could get. The result above is one of those attempts. I saw some very interesting things performing this experiment. Robert makes a very interesting ‘M’ shape  just as he is moving towards home plate. During that motion he is also moving down and forward. At such a low shutter speed I had to pan both ways evenly with him. I never did get the full ‘M’ correctly using this technique, but I did capture the moment before. This was an interesting experiment, and I would like to try it again someday. Maybe tonights pitcher will go nearly 11 innings as well so I can try again.

Technical Data

I was in manual mode while shooting here. I had my exposure close to where I wanted it, although perhaps a touch overexposed to achieve my blur. I fixed that in Lightroom as well as added a little back to the highlights. I cropped in as well to better feature Robert. As with most of the sports shots this was an easy edit after the fact.

Posted by on May 17, 2013 in Canon 60D, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L II, College Baseball, Lightroom, Purdue, Sports, West Lafayette/Lafayette and tagged , , .

1 Comment

May 16, 2013

Honoring Our Heroes

honring heroes

Photo of the Day

Here is yet another photo taken in 2008 when we were in New York. We arrived just after September 11th of that year so everyone was remembering all of the heroes who lost their lives seven years earlier. For some reason I have always liked this picture of the man against the red door looking at the memorial.

Technical Data

This picture was taken before I knew about the ways that you could edit a photo. I was in auto mode, and it missed the exposure. Now I make sure that it doesn’t happen, but in 2008 I was clueless. Like I said above I have always liked this picture, and now it can be shown because of a little work that made it better. I cropped in quite a bit to make up for the lack of zoom on my camera. I then applied Matt Kloskowski’s light sports preset to the image. I really didn’t need to do much to it after that to get an image that I liked.

Posted by on May 16, 2013 in Canon 18-55mm, Canon Rebel XT, Downtown, Lightroom, Lightroom Presets, New York City and tagged , .

Leave a Comment

May 15, 2013

On A Rampage

rampage

Photo of the Day

Saturday night I photographed the Lafayette Brawlin’ Dolls bout. I had an interesting day leading up to the bout so I did not get to implement many of the things that I was going to try. Maybe I can do that during the next bout. During the bout I tried a couple of new things thanks to a fellow photographer who attended the bout. One of them was panning with second curtain flash. I really did not have a lot of success with the method, but when it was close I loved the results. I think that with a little practice this could be a great way to get some special pictures. I have an idea for this during the next bout that I will have to try. For now here is this picture of LBD skater Rampage trying to get around the jammer for Kokomo. I was not really pleased overall with my pictures from Saturday night, but some of the decent ones can be found on my Facebook page here.

Technical Data

I didn’t do much to this picture. I did adjust the exposure, highlights, and temperature though. I don’t use flash much for sports so it was a chore getting the settings dialed in. Once I did though it made sense, and I think that next time I know where to start.

Posted by on May 15, 2013 in Canon 430ex II, Canon 60D, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L II, Lightroom, Roller Derby, Sports, West Lafayette/Lafayette and tagged , .

2 Comments

May 11, 2013

Derby Time!

tree slugger

Photo of the Day

Today is yet another busy Saturday. This morning I have two baseball games followed by a roller derby bout tonight. I am excited for the day though. I have a couple of things that I am going to try at the baseball game followed by a night of trying new things at the bout. I really think that I did alright at the first bout, but I want to make pictures a bit more interesting than I did at that one. I am going to introduce a little flash tomorrow night to freeze the action a bit more. I am also going to try and use the flash to give me a couple of different looks. I am also going to try my first ever time lapse. With all of that I also plan on setting up another remote camera, but this time in a much better location. I liked what I saw from the remote last game, but I have bigger plans for it. I will post links to everything after the pictures are processed of course.

Bout Time

Here are some links to help you find your way to the bout should you want to attend. This morning there is a trike race and bike ride in downtown Lafayette. Bicycle Lafayette also plans on riding their bikes over to the bout. You can find more info on that here on their Facebook event page. Of course you can find more info on the Lafayette Brawlin’ Dolls by clicking on the flashing banner on the left side of this page. You can also click this link here to go to their main page. The event page for the bout can also be found on Facebook here. Roller derby is a blast to watch. I hope Continue Reading →

Posted by on May 11, 2013 in Canon 60D, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L II, Lightroom, Lightroom Presets, Roller Derby, Sports, West Lafayette/Lafayette and tagged , , .

Leave a Comment

May 10, 2013

A Rival’s Respect

stan musial navy pier

Photo of the Day

I took this photo at Navy Pier in 2011 while on a photowalk. I was captivated by the fact that at a Harry Carey’s restaurant they had a jersey of Stan Musial in a display case. The Cubs are supposed to be the rivals of the Cardinals, yet here is Stan’s jersey. I think that the jersey is another sign of how well loved Stan was by everyone. He really was a figure that was above the game. I wore the number six in little league, and being a numbers person looked up current players who had the number. Back then I was also learning about the greats of the game. Knowing the I had the same number as Stan Musial was pretty cool. Just a couple of Polish kids playing a very cool game. I was sad to hear of his passing before the season this year, but his name will live on.

Technical Data

I wanted an older feel to this picture. I tried a couple of presets to get that, but they didn’t give me what I wanted. I ended up using one of Trey Ratcliff’s presets called Big Wheel Race. I have used this preset a bit in the past, and I love the look that I get. I added a slight vignette along with a couple of other tweaks to give it the look that I wanted.

Posted by on May 10, 2013 in Canon 18-55mm, Canon Rebel XT, Chicago, Lightroom, Lightroom Presets, Major League Baseball, Sports and tagged , , , .

Leave a Comment