Super Bowl Sunday!

Sports Photo of the Day

Today is the day that most fans wait for every year. In fact people who are not even sports fans can’t wait for Super Bowl Sunday. It is the one day where football takes center stage over everything else. If you don’t believe me change your channels during the halftime show to see all of the programming that is centered around the game. I will be in the air during the big game so I will miss the commercials. I have a clear favorite today though. I grew up watching the great San Francisco teams of the 80’s with Joe Montana at the helm. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick is much different than Joe, but I still want to see San Francisco win. I did read the Blind Side so I do have a soft spot for Baltimore Ravens tackle Michael Oher. I just think that the Ravens team has some elements that make it hard for me to root for them.

I took this picture last year when the Super Bowl was in Indianapolis. I went the week before to see how the town was celebrating the event. It really was a good day, and I took some pictures that I am proud of. I loved the way that they lined up Indy cars with every team on them three wide as if this was the start of the Indy 500. They did a great job of blending the racing that the city is known for with the big game that invaded the town. I hope that they bring the Super Bowl back again as it was a great time. Maybe my Packers will make the big game the next time.

Technical Data

When I saw this in person I was still in the midst of my HDR craze. I took three shots of every scene that day in order to run them through Photomatix Pro to make HDR images. What I made were some terrible pictures. On my Facebook page those shots are still up. I was so in love with the look that I was overdoing it. For the shot that you see above I took one of the three images into Lightroom to edit it the way that I think makes it look the most like it did in person. I used no preset here. What I did use though was a bunch of sliders in combination with each other in order to get the colors to come out as they did in person. As with the plane shot from earlier today the camera cannot see all of the light that your eye can. Your eye can see 27 stops of light while the camera can only see five. It is up to you to bring out all of the light. On a scene like this the light range is so dynamic that you have to use post processing to bring it out.

SmugMug Site

Here is a link to this picture on my SmugMug site. These trips do not pay for themselves. If you like this picture it is available to own!