More Baseball

I think I am starting to understand how to shoot baseball games (at least how to set up the camera...). Here is what I learned:

1) Shutter speed is VERY important!! Even leaning on a metal railing I had difficulty keeping the camera shake to a minimum. Even with the Image Stabilization on I had to keep the shutter at close to a 300th of a second.

2) The faster the glass the better! It's hard to keep the shutter speed fast in the artificial lighting. There is just not enough of it. My 70-300 IS has a minimum aperture of 5.6 on the long end which would have been nearly acceptable if it were not for the fact that it's too soft wide open. I ended up raising it to 6.3.

3) ISO speeds of 800-1000 are going to be necessary. As much as I hate the grain from these high speeds, I had to make a trade off to raise the f-stop and keep the shutter speed high. I did find that when using these high ISOs you should over expose by a half stop or so. It really helps to keep the noise out of the darker areas of the shot. It is easy to take it down a notch in post.

4) Use the spot meter. I found that without it I had to over expose more than one full stop to keep the noise down on the shadowed players faces. I had better luck trying to spot meter there faces and then overexpose by one half stop.

5) Use good noise reduction software in post. As much as I like the utility and results in most cases when I use the GIMP to process my images, it's GREYCSTORATION plugin just would not cut it on these images. The process made them far too soft. I am now using Neat Image which has an image noise profiler. In my opinion the results were much better. I was going to purchase noise ninja which got a bit higher rating in a photography magazine I read, but I got frustrated with their demo program and decided on Neat Image. (more on this later...)

6) Use the highest speed drive setting. I found that by using this setting I could usually capture the ball either on it's way to the batter or moving away. I would actually watch the batter and catcher to see when they were getting set for the pitch. Tt that point I made last second framing and focusing decisions and just held down the shutter release until the pitch was over.

I had a LOT of pictures when I left the stadium. I would say that 98% of them were blurry, too noisy or really badly composed. I now know why the folks who do this for a living buy the 2000-4000 dollar fast high rez glass and use a tripod.

All in all, it was a fun time and I learned a lot. It's always good to try new things.