Preparing For Battle

Photo of the Day

Last night I shot the practice and scrimmage for the Lafayette Brawlin’ Dolls. I have not shot derby since the last bout in October of last year. I wanted to get some of the timing back so that on Sunday during the first bout I would not be rusty. I had another objective. I am going to document the first bout of the season using a new website called Exposure. You can find the page here. I will have a little more on that later in the post. For now I will just say that it was great to be back photographing derby.

Technical Data

This photo has a few technical aspects to it. I was in the center of the track as the team was skating around. I had my flash on my camera to stop the action with a slow shutter speed. The combination of the two gives a little sense of motion to the photograph. During the skating portion of the practice I shot everything very similar to this just varying some of the variables to see what would happen. I was having fun during what should be a boring portion of the practice.

To edit the photo I took it into Lightroom 5 to convert it to black and white. I used the HDR in Black and White preset from Matt Kloskowski. I use these presets to get close to what I want. I was in auto white balance at the time which was a mistake, but it is one easily fixed in Lightroom. I also adjusted the blacks and whites in the photo. A quick tip to adjust the blacks and whites is to hold down the option key on a mac while grabbing the slider that you want to change. The picture will change to show you the level that you are at. I try and just have a little showing here for the most part.

Documenting the Bout

For this season opening bout I have started an Exposure site. The site that you can find here is a great way to tell a story. I will see how this goes, and then decide if I should do the same for the home opener. I have seen this done a few times now, but the best that I have seen so far was done right here at Purdue. Andrew Hancock documented the Purdue Basketball game against Wisconsin. He did a great job, and made me want to try the same thing. I don’t have his clout at Purdue so I had to wait until derby started up to try it. That being said this is a great subject for this new medium though. I will keep updating the site as the bout draws near.