I really like the idea of making some videos showing exactly what goes into an event. I have already shown some snippets of shooting roller derby, but I thought I would show a quick video showing some of the post processing that is involved. It really seems glamorous shooting an event, but in this day and age more time is spent in front of the computer than actually at the event. I could dial in my settings and just use the jpeg files, but with lights overhead that are always changing you never know exactly what you are going to get. At an away bout I just take the essentials. I don’t have all my strobes with me so I shoot available light or with an on camera flash. That means that I need the power of the RAW file at times. When the flash doesn’t fire I still can recover the photo. A couple of those were keepers, and you can see me bring them back in the video. I don’t know how often I will do things like this, but it seemed like a cool video to make. The one thing that you will notice is the cropping. In landscape photography I do not like to crop. I move my feet to get the shot that I want. In sports though you really have no choice. I learned a lesson early on this year in that you shoot a little loose so that the unexpected moment does not jump out of the frame. In sports photography the crop tool is your friend.
During the two bouts I made around 1,750 images. Part of the video shows the process where the bad photos are weeded out, The good photos are then tagged with a white flag. Those images with the white flag are then what gets put up on Facebook or my web gallery when I am shooting for the school. This is probably the biggest amount of photos that I will edit at one time. I may try this again with a smaller batch of photos so that I can slow the video down a bit. I felt like seven minutes was pretty long as it was.
Dave Wegiel Photography 