Photo of the Day
Last night I shot another baseball game at Purdue. As I left the stadium the night before I had an idea for a picture. In the bottom of the eighth inning I grabbed my gear to go and give it a shot. This was only the second game under the lights at Alexander Field so I wanted to capture that from centerfield. I grabbed my camera and two lenses and made my way to where I wanted to get the shot. Purdue had a student broadcast of the game going on with a camera on a lift in centerfield. I tried to talk to the girl up on the lift to see if she wouldn’t mind me getting a couple of pictures from up there, but she flat out ignored me. I tried to let my media pass show, but I guess ignore was her defense. I walked back to my car and grabbed the center piece from my tripod. It is basically a monopod that way, and I could now lift my camera over the fence. I put my camera in timer mode with it set to bracket three shots. Of course without being up there I could not get exposure correct so I had to guess and adjust based on what I saw on the screen. When I finally had the exposure correct I then focused on composing the photo. I had to mark where the camera was pointing, and adjust from there. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would though, and I was happy with my end result. I do have one idea for a future game based off of this photo that I would like to try.
Technical Data
Actually a couple of interesting things here. The first is that I shot this with my 10-24mm lens first. I liked what I had, but I thought for fun I would put on the 8mm fisheye lens that I bought a couple of months ago. When I saw the curve of the fence I knew that I had my picture. I tried to angle the shot so that I could get the scoreboard and the sunset in the frame as well as most of the right center field wall. As I said above I shot three exposures here with the intent of making an HDR image out of them. I was running a rather high ISO to keep the shutter speed reasonable, but I hoped that it would work. Had I been on the lift with my tripod I could have shot longer, and kept my ISO down. I was already at 1/15th of a second for my overexposed frame handholding on a monopod over my head. I was on shaky ground for sure. I ran the photos through Photomatix to combine the images. I used the ghosting feature to keep the players from becoming ghosts. The new version of Photomatix does a great job of this all on its own. With the 1600 ISO I knew that Photomatix would introduce too much noise if I processed the photo in there. Once I had the 32 bit image that it came up with I saved it so that I could work on it in Lightroom. There I worked the sliders until I had an image that appeared as it did in person. HDR in Lightroom is a great way to make realistic looking HDR pictures. Just for fun today I ran that image through Photomatix to see what would happen. Some of the effects were great, but very grainy. That is the one limitation of this software.
More Images From the Games
You can find more images from the games that I have shot this season on Purdue’s website here. In just the five games that I have shot this season I have learned a lot. They play three more games this weekend so I will have a great chance to get out and shoot again.
Dave Wegiel Photography 