A Focused Delivery

Sports Photo of the Day

This year I have really been trying to take my sports photography up another level. While shooting one of Purdue’s baseball games a couple of weeks ago one of the photographers (the photographer is Andy Jessop give his work a look) gave me a great tip. It was a pitcher that did not have the best form. I didn’t know how to make a good picture of a pitcher that isn’t very photogenic. He suggested just going tight on the upper body. I really don’t have the lens to do this very well, but I have started going in as close as I can so that I can crop in a bit later. I really like the results, and now no matter the form of the pitcher I try and get this shot. This pitcher here actually did have a photogenic motion, but it doesn’t hurt to follow a routine. I have found that I do have a routine when it comes to getting my shots of the pitcher. I get some shots from their open side, then get some shots from behind the catcher, and then finally make a few pictures from behind the pitcher. Between the three angles I usually see something interesting. When that process is complete I usually will then sit on an infielder hoping for a great catch. I will have more on that in a future post.

If you are so inclined you can see some other images from the West Lafayette Junior Varsity game on my Facebook page here.

Technical Data

This photo was edited using my Baseball (Day) preset for Lightroom. I had it apply the preset upon import. It really gets my images very close to where they will finally be. As I said above with my 70-200mm lens even with the 1.4x extender I can’t get in as tight as I would like to. I had to get there by cropping this image. I really liked the result, but for some reason the noise that I have seen with the extender really showed its head again. I think that with my sensor already being a crop sensor the noise is magnified as well. I may have to try an experiment tomorrow to see why this happens. To get rid of the noise I used the noise reduction tool inside of Lightroom. That did the trick, and the photo was ready to export.