The Opening Pitch

Sports Photo of the Day

Today is the day that Purdue Baseball has been looking forward to for a long time. They will finally be able to open up their new stadium. Alexander Field was supposed to open last April, but delays forced the Boilers to play one final season at Lambert Field. As it turns out that was a very historic season. Now a very new look team will open up the new stadium. It almost seems fitting. Purdue lost a lot of key pieces to that historic 2012 title team, but that is part of college sports. In the picture above one of the new freshmen Patrick Kenney pitches during a fall series game. I was excited to see the Boilers play in their new stadium enough to go and watch a glorified practice. It will be nice to see them play a meaningful game today. As I write this it is freezing cold with a high wind. That does not conjure up images of the boys of summer, but baseball is baseball.

edit: Of course as I write about how the delays are over, and the the new stadium is now open the game was cancelled. The cold combined with the high winds were just too much, and the opening of Alexander Field should now be on Friday. Of course locusts may descend by then pushing the opening of the stadium back even further.

Technical Data

The game where I made this picture was very exciting to me. On one hand I was able to see the new stadium, but I was also able to use my new 70-200mm lens. This was an upgrade from the lens that I had made my pictures with up until then. Part of the fun was using this faster lens in ways that I could not do before. For the picture above I had my 1.4x multiplier on the lens to get a bit closer. I did lose a stop of light by doing that, but I think it was worth it. For this post I went a little heavy on the post processing. I wanted the picture to pop a bit so I used Matt Kloskowski’s light sports preset for Lightroom. I did work on the image a bit after that to get it a little closer to reality. One thing that Lightroom will not help with is the shadow from the baseball cap. It may sound crazy, but for action pictures in baseball I would prefer a bright overcast day. Just enough clouds to block the sun is perfect. That way you do not get the shadow under the cap. I could have tried to lesson the shadow, but I always think that it looks fake. For that reason I left it alone.