Buy Me Some Peanuts And Cracker Jacks

Sports Photo of the Day

This is another shot that was one of my favorites from this past year. This was from my first Major League game of the year just a couple of days before my birthday. That day I went to both the Cubs and Sox games making it a very cool day for me. I have always wanted to do that, and things finally worked out so that I could. Whenever I have left Wrigley I have always thought that this was an interesting view. The people who sit here can’t see everything, but they still enjoy being at the park enough to come. The Cubs do try and help the fans out though. They get that mini scoreboard that is sponsored by United. They get flat screen TV’s so that they can follow any action in the air. This has always just been a cool view in my mind. I have always wanted to get a shot from here when the stadium is full so we walked to here as the game was winding down in the bottom of the ninth. Some of the fans are even up in their seats because the Cubs were just down a run. One swing could tie it. That did not happen that day, but to many of the Cubs faithful that doesn’t matter. It is the day at the park that counts.

Technical Data

I had some fun with this one. To start off this is a three image HDR shot processed in Photomatix. That was the intent when I was shooting this. I knew that with the shadows that the fans were in, and the brightly lit field I could not get a proper exposure that would satisfy both conditions here. Once Photomatix had given me my 16 bit tif file I brought it back to Lightroom to use the sliders there. When I got there though I had an idea. I applied another of Matt Kloskowski’s filters here. This time I used the strong ‘300 look’ filter. That took out all the color but red. I slowly added back the blues, and greens to get the shot that you see above. It is a bit artsy, but I like how it turned out.