Hurry Up and Wait

Photo of the Day

In 2010 I was lucky enough to go to Wrigley Field for the Northwestern football game against Illinois. They had turned the famous baseball stadium into a nice little football venue. Before the game the Northwestern band was waiting for its cue to be part of College Gameday which was being shot across the street. The band hurried into position only to then stand around and wait. Something about the pose of the drum major here that told me to take this shot. I have loved it ever since. I wish that I had a wide angle for this moment, but in the end I might have ruined the shot then. With Northwestern winning its first bowl game since 1949 yesterday I figured that today was a good day to finally post this shot.

Technical Data

Even though I said I wished that I had a wide angle above I still cropped this shot. Some of the data on the right hand side of the photo was just way too light because of the harsh sun. This was midday after all. I tried a couple of techniques to bring it back to no avail. This was a jpeg after all, and the glare on that side of Wrigley was just too harsh to get rid of. Nothing really seemed to look right. For this shot I used the light sports gameday preset in Lightroom to get started. I really just liked how that looked. From there I tweaked the sliders to get myself to where I was happy with the shot. Everything looked good except for the N on the back of the band uniform. I actually used the brush tool in Lightroom to lighten that up a bit, and bring it back to the white it should have been. I spent more time than normal on this shot, but I liked it enough to justify that.