A Sunny Outlook

Photo of the Day

As I said yesterday I attended two baseball games yesterday. I saw the first few innings of a JV baseball game where I had a blast making pictures of the pitcher. He was the reason that I went to the game so it was rewarding to make some good pictures. I left that game in order to get to the start of the Purdue baseball game against Butler. I did not miss much of the game, and I was able to see all of the offense. As the game was winding down I was moving over to the third base camera well. As I was walking down the steps to the gate I noticed the sun peeking through a gap in the stadium. I hurried up and swapped lenses so that I could make this picture. The sun was moving quick, and I had to move up a couple of steps to get the angle that I needed. This is a brand new ballpark, and I am constantly finding out new things about it. This moment showed me one more feature of this park that I had not thought about yet. Had the sky been cloudy I had an idea for a picture. When the clouds were not there I thought my ballpark picture was lost for the night. I was very wrong about that.

One note about this picture. It almost cost me my 10-24mm lens. I was making pictures at the game with my 70-200mm with the 1.4x teleconverter on it. In order to get this picture I had to perform a very quick lens swap. After getting the frames that I needed I swapped the lenses again. In my haste I did not zip up the compartment of my camera bag. I wanted to hurry up and get on the field before the action started so I was in way too big of a hurry. When I slung my bag on my shoulder the lens hit the concrete step. I will say one thing. Tamron makes a very sturdy lens. I used it later on in the night, and it appeared to be just fine. Somehow it made it through so that this could be a good story instead of a horror story.

If you want to see the photos from the JV game that I saw before the Purdue game you can click on the link here to go to the album on my Facebook page. I will have more photos from the Purdue game up later, but I am not sure where just yet.

Technical Data

This picture would not have been possible a year ago. I knew that the light was too dynamic to capture this in one image. I quickly set my camera to make three images at -3, 0, and 3. I normally do not bracket so far apart, but the dynamic nature of the scene dictated that. I usually wish that I had more one way or another later on in the process. When I loaded my images into Lightroom the first thing that I did was to find these three images. I immediately sent them over to Photomatix to process them there. I saved the 32 bit file that Photomatix makes, and then tried to use the program to finish my work. No matter what I did in Photomatix it either looked too fake or too dark. I just couldn’t get it right. I went back to Lightroom to find the 32 bit file so that I could try that one. From the start I knew that I had a winner. I tweaked the sliders a bit to get the image right where I wanted it. I really enjoy the way that the 32 bit image looks in Lightroom. This is a little trick that has made my images look much more realistic. If you look at the picture you would probably know that it is not possible to have everything look good here. Through technology though it is possible to see it.