Blue Hour Baseball
Blue Hour Baseball 135mm, f/3.5, 1/250s, ISO 3200
I recently took in a high school baseball game in the role of the official photographer (filling in for Pete Talke). When on the first base side I often tried to get photos of a baserunner avoiding a pick-off when he took a big lead. I generally would prefocus near the base to avoid having autofocus go off in the weeds. There were a few decent images from the night and I decided to process this one with some textures in order to put into practice a few things I’d learned recently. This isn’t the most exciting image (other images had dirt flying, etc) but I chose it because both players are shown well and the coach is completely out of the frame. It also happened to be the “blue hour”, that time of deepening darkness after sunset when the sky has that deep blue hue.
First step: clone out the light poles from the original (shown with basic edits below). Had I been at a wide enough angle and the actual light fixtures themselves been showing I likely would have left them in as they would add that baseball park feel to the image. They were simply annoying in my framing.
Original image
I continued by choosing a few textures which had potential. Some were picked based on color, some solely on the actual texture (It’s “shape”? Not sure what words to use to describe that…). I loaded up the starting image and the textures and began experimenting. I blended in earthy-toned textures more heavily into the dirt and grass while using more blues in the sky. Some textures I incorporated into the whole image and some only in a portion. Blend modes used were overlay, soft light, and linear light. Below I show a screenshot of what I ended up with as layers and masks. There were many pleasing combinations and frankly it was hard to decide what direction to take at times. I also took the liberty of modifying the texture layers with the clone stamp in two cases. One example was the “Office” texture had some text in it which I found very nice until I added the skyline — just didn’t work so I cloned out the text. Some layers are more prominent than others as well — the second scratched copper layer was rotated about 30 degrees from the first then blended in but in truth is barely noticeable at all. I could probably remove that layer without changing the image much.
The skyline was added as an afterthought when I already considered myself done. My original intent with it was to use the layer (original skyline image is here) to create something similar to what an artist would sketch in pen then blend the hard pen strokes into the sky as another texture. However, I ended up using a gaussian blur of 5-ish pixels to soften it like the existing background then blended it in with a blend mode of ‘soft light’. Your mileage may vary but I like how it’s there but very subtle and not too distracting from the action. It’s not intended to look real but just add another element of texture to the image. [Artistic honesty disclosure: The Austin skyline is not visible from the Lake Travis High School baseball diamond…I added it in post in case that wasn’t abundantly clear]. Incidentally, the skyline layer is the same image which the Red Cross of Central Texas uses on their website.
I used 4 curves layers: A general s-curve, a darkening curve for parts of the image (luminosity blend mode), a lightening curve for a very small piece (could’ve just used the dodge tool), and another darkening curve for adding some vignette.
One last change I considered was adding a ball in-flight to the first baseman. I decided against for now because the only positions for the ball that I thought were natural seemed to unbalance the whole image IMO.
Scratched copper texture is from Tymcode
Office texture is from ArtByChrysti
Scratched rainbow texture is from Pink Sherbet Photography
Paper texture is from Visualogist
America’s Pastime
America's Pastime 200mm, f/2.8, 1/3000s, ISO 100
There’s nothing as all-American as baseball or so they say. Last night I had the opportunity to shoot at the Lake Travis High School baseball game with Pete Talke. I jumped on this because in a few weeks I’ll be filling in for him as the “official” photog for one game. One can always use a bit of practice for these things.
Photographing baseball looks easy until you try it. I learned several things based on my experimentation last night and from shooting a little bit at Austin Aztex soccer games. First, finding the “correct” exposure can be tricky. Most of the shots are high dynamic range situations — think blazing sunlight off bleached white pants contrasted with deep shadows on the backside of a red and black shirt. There is also the sun-lit scoreboard in the outfield contrasted with the early evening shadows which are beginning to cross the infield. Since bracketing exposures for action images wasn’t really an option, it came down to a judgment call — picking an exposure which balanced some blown-out highlights with getting enough detail. I found that I was generally able to get away with aperture priority mode and the camera did a decent job with the shutter speed (which was well within the range I wanted to keep it). Occasionally I used manual mode if the lighting was such that the camera couldn’t get it right.
Another tricky area is focusing. I found that pre-focusing in manual focus mode worked better for capturing the batter in the batter’s box. When using auto focus there were some shots which inadvertently focused on the opposite dugout. I also missed a very cool action sequence where a runner nearly got picked off at first when he took a generous lead. I was shooting from the first base side and captured a sequence where the runner was diving back to first as the first baseman attempted the tag — great shots with clouds of dust everywhere. However, my focus happened to latch onto the outfield fence in the background. Bummer. Next time I’ll pre-focus there as well.
I had a great time, especially since I wasn’t under pressure to produce and could just experiment. The shot above was taken during warm-ups. I liked the combination of action and the American flag in the background. Many frames were taken of this scene because I was attempting to all at once capture (1) the throwing motion, (2) the ball in the air, (3) the players not being in (very) awkward positions, (4) the flag blowing in the wind. Unfortunately I didn’t get exactly what I wanted in any frames (I wanted the player earlier in the throwing motion and the ball lower in the frame). The final choice of a frame was a compromise and the main factor was that the flag showed best in this one while the other elements were “OK”. I added more skew to the angle because I found it more interesting. I wanted to crop slightly differently but decided not to so I could retain the “345” marker in the left side of the frame.
As for processing the image, I decided to experiment there as well. First, I flipped the flags to blow to the right rather than the left (artistic liberty right?). Then I added two textures (inspired by Pete’s images), masked in different contrast layers in areas of the frame, and did a little dodging and burning on the ball itself to get the look I wanted. Hope you like it too.
Texture info…arbitrarily picked the first two I saw which were at all interesting. These are used under creative commons from “pareeerica” on flickr.
Michael Tuuk Photography 