Sports Photo of the Day
I really was not going to post a sports photo today. I don’t have a game to be at today so I thought that I would take the day off of sports photography. Last night though I posed a question on the Sports Shooters group on Google+ that I thought I would post here as well. Late Saturday night I watched a new episode of ‘The Grid’ with Scott Kelby, Matt Kloskowski, and Dave Black. Dave Black is a photographer that I really like because for one he is very good, but he also shares much of his knowledge of what makes him good. During that show they talked about eliminating distractions in your pictures. Dave said that signs should not be included. For some reason at Purdue games I like to include the signs. The shot above is one example of one that I liked. I wish I could say that I framed the shot this way, but I did not. I was getting a couple of shots of the pitcher when the ball was hit to short. I panned over, and made this picture of Purdue shortstop Jake Hansen throwing to first. When I took it I knew that I had captured a moment. Looking at my LCD screen I also realized that I had the ball lined up with the bright blue Big Ten sign. Any crop would leave me with part of the sign still showing. I decided to show the elephant in the room by putting the entire sign in the shot. The above image is the one that I submitted to the Purdue Athletic department. The discussion on the Google+ page I thought was pretty good. The members that responded seemed to be split on what to do. One photographer who has been featured in Sports Illustrated said that the sign should be gone. I went back and tried a couple of crops to see if anything would work. I tried the upper body with the ball as well as the entire body. Neither of them looked that great to me. I really like the image with the sign. I guess that I have to change my position in the future to make sure that nobody is line up with a sign. Although in a shot like this where the player moved to get the ball I really have to take what I can get. Backgrounds are important, but in sports photography you can’t always choose your background.
What are your thoughts on the sign in this picture? Does it distract you, or does it add a sense of place to the photo.
One of the things that might not be thought about too much when it comes to sports photography is the cropping issue. I shoot with a 70-200mm lens so I can’t always fill the frame with the action. I have to come up with a way to crop a lot of my images. I am always debating the crop, perhaps too much. When I talk about the crop in the technical section I will say something like performed a small crop, but that doesn’t always convey the torment that I go through with certain shots. Sometimes the crop is just a simple horizon correction. Other times it can be a big crop to get the action where I want it in the frame. The decision process might not take very long, but over the course of a game shoot it can get to me.
If you want to see my pictures from the weekend series you can find them here on my Facebook page.
Technical Data
Just a small crop added here. See what I did there? I did crop in a bit to get a little closer to the action. Before that though while the photo was being imported I had it apply my Baseball Day preset to it. This is a little recipe that is still ongoing that seems to really get every image close to where I like them. In this case it really did get me right there. I performed a very small temperature adjustment, and I was done. The new preset has really made life easy for me.
Dave Wegiel Photography 