Infrared Baseball With The Lafayette Aviators

This past weekend I took the infrared camera to the Lafayette Aviators games for a little fun. I have had an idea to play around with infrared during sports for a while now, but access was just not there to do it until now. This is a very selfish project for me. I highly doubt that most of these photos will be able to be used for anything, but it is a way for me to get a little creative as the season is winding down. During the games I was still covering the game as I normally would, but I always had the infrared camera ready for some key moments. It was fun learning just what would work, and of course what would not work so well. Below are a few photos that I liked from this past homestead. The past four days have been my normal galleries from the games as well if you would like to check those out.

So there it is. A little fun during a homestand which included five games in four days. That seems like a lot, but the reality is that my sports season is winding down. One more homestand with the Aviators and then my sports schedule becomes very spotty. This was a fun five games though with the Aviators winning four of them. Baseball is a very fun game to photograph, and it was fun to try and show it (literally) in a different light for a few games. I don’t know that you will see this level of infrared work again for a while, but every now and then it really does make for some nice black and white images. It is a fun tool to have in the bag.

Processing Infrared Images

This was the interesting part for me to figure out. In the camera these images looked amazing. They were exactly what I had in mind when I was thinking about this project. When the images came into Lightroom though they all had a terrible pink hue to them. Apparently Lightroom is not designed for these types of images so the white balance could get messed up. I found that I had to put together a three step process to get the image back to where it was out of camera. It was a little more work, but for this project it was not too bad. If I was making these images every day I could see where it could really start to get annoying. That was all part of the fun though in learning this new technique. The fun part of photography to me is that you sometimes have to problem solve. If it were always easy then it would not be that much fun at all.