The Pitching Motion

Photo of the Day

Last night I returned to shooting baseball. A week ago today I suffered two fractures around my left eye which is the eye that I shoot with. I have been practicing switching over the last few weeks so that I can watch the pitcher with the left eye while on the third base line. That training came in handy last night. I spent most of my time on the third base side so that I could look through the camera with my left eye. Purdue pitcher Robert Ramer had a great night pitching for the last time as a Boilermaker. He went 10 2/3 innings giving up only two runs. As a photographer though the same pitcher for any length of time can get boring. I decided to try something new in the later innings. I kept taking my shutter speed lower and lower until I was down to 1/30th of a second. I then panned with Robert to see what I could get. The result above is one of those attempts. I saw some very interesting things performing this experiment. Robert makes a very interesting ‘M’ shape  just as he is moving towards home plate. During that motion he is also moving down and forward. At such a low shutter speed I had to pan both ways evenly with him. I never did get the full ‘M’ correctly using this technique, but I did capture the moment before. This was an interesting experiment, and I would like to try it again someday. Maybe tonights pitcher will go nearly 11 innings as well so I can try again.

Technical Data

I was in manual mode while shooting here. I had my exposure close to where I wanted it, although perhaps a touch overexposed to achieve my blur. I fixed that in Lightroom as well as added a little back to the highlights. I cropped in as well to better feature Robert. As with most of the sports shots this was an easy edit after the fact.