Hallowed Ground

Sports Photo of the Day

In 2008 we visited New York with a couple of goals in mind. One of them was to visit Yankee Stadium during its final year. I was very excited to see this stadium for sure. This was the “House that Ruth Built” after all. So much history in this stadium. The Yankees do a great job of honoring that history. They have always had a form of monument park, but before the 70’s the monuments were in the field of play. Imagine running back to catch a fly ball and dodging a monument to Babe Ruth. When the ballpark was renovated in the 70’s the fence was moved in, and the park was no longer in the field of play. Before the game we got to the stadium early so that we could tour through the monuments. I was very excited to be here, and I had to wait just a bit to get this picture with nobody in it. I wanted this shot, and it seemed as if everyone kept leaning into it. I loved the way that you see where you are at, and can then follow down through history. This section has been moved over to the new stadium so I will have to visit it someday.

Technical Data

This is where I get to talk about how this photo was processed. For a long time now I have been using a few methods to get good black and white images. I have heard great things about Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro, but I have never gotten to use it. I would not work on my old laptop, and they would not let me try another trial when I switched to a Mac. The program was $250 so I want to try it before I buy it. I pretty much thought that I would not get to try it. Today I kept reading about people who had just bought a new package from Nik. They were bought by Google a while back, and today the result of that merger was seen. Google made the entire Nik collection available for $150. What! If you don’t have the suite already hurry up and buy it before they change their mind.

So anyway I had to try out Silver Efex Pro 2 as soon as I downloaded the software. I was looking for an image that I knew I wanted in black and white, and this one popped out to me. I had tried to make this black and white in Lightroom, but I didn’t like the final result. I opened up the program very excited to see what I could do with this photo. Sadly though it was the first preset that I clicked on that I liked the best. I did go through the rest though just to see what they could do. The ‘Full Dynamic (harsh)’ preset really made this picture pop for me. I will probably be posting way too many black and white pictures in the next few days as I play around with my new toy.