Feel the Pain

Sports Photo of the Day

Saturday I had a long day. It was made longer when I decided to go and shoot Purdue’s track meet. For the year I made a few photography goals. Some of them were shared on this blog. One of them was to get out of my comfort zone and shoot a few new sports. I know football and baseball pretty well. I have a pretty good knowledge of basketball. I wanted to try and shoot some sports that were not natural to me. I was emboldened by a decent outing shooting soccer last weekend. Why couldn’t I nail some shots at a track meet? I went in with a couple of ideas, but quickly found out that I know nothing about track. I may have ran track (ran is a strong word. I threw shot and discuss) in high school, but I didn’t get around to watching the other events back then. I was clueless as to what some of them are. Take Steeplechase for example. That race was something that I had no clue about, and I am still wondering why some of it is included. I came away with a few decent shots, but I was not happy with my work at all. I have posted a few photos on my Facebook page here if you want to take a look at what I captured. I have some ideas for my next attempt although I don’t know when that will be. I think that this was the only home meet that Purdue has this year. I might have to crash a high school event to exercise some demons and get the shots I know I can make. I only took my 70-200mm lens with the 1.4x converter into the track. I was going to take all of my lenses but decided to travel light. That was a huge mistake. I think that I could shoot some interesting pictures up close with my wide angle. Lesson learned I guess. I have a new sense of where I stand, and a hunger to get better. I will try another new sport tomorrow when I try my hand at Tennis photography. I will post the results of that experiment after I edit the photos.

A Marathon Day

Saturday was a long day for sure. I walked into the Rankin Track complex at a little before eleven o’clock in the morning Saturday. I shot there as long as I could and still make the baseball game. I then made it to the ballgame in time to shoot that. I then quickly went home to change, and then went to the Fairgrounds to shoot the home opener of the Lafayette Brawlin’ Dolls. I packed up my camera, and left the fairgrounds at ten o’clock that night. That is 11 action filled hours. I had a blast, and even came away with some interesting images. It is easy to do though when you take nearly 2,500 of them in a day. Some of them were exploratory at the track meet. At the baseball game I took the standard shots with nothing to out of the ordinary. I did take quite a few at the bout. I guess that I felt as if I needed to cover everything since it was the opening of the new Brawl House. I took shots from all over trying to document the day. In the end I feel that I overshot it, but I didn’t want to leave anything out. At the bout I also broke out my Rebel for the first time in almost two years. I have not used the camera since I bought my 60D. I used it for some remotes, and it did pretty well. The image quality is not that great, but it got the job done. I am thinking of a new way to use it at the next bout in May that might push it a bit more. We will see. It is a good thing that I purchased a Drobo a couple of weeks ago. I may have to purchase more storage for it though if I keep up like I did over the weekend. If you add in the pictures that I took at the Purdue game yesterday that is a lot of editing to do.

Technical Data

The shot above was not hard to edit. When I brought it into Lightroom I applied my Baseball (Day) preset to it. The conditions were roughly the same so it would work well. I then adjusted the exposure and white balance a bit. A small crop was applied, and that was it here. I know that you shouldn’t have distractions like the water tower in the background, but I like it here. It gives you a sense of place. Someday I might listen to the rules, but for now I will stay stubborn.