A Hitting Machine

Grady Sizemore has sparked the Indian's offense since being moved to the leadoff poistion.

this post is for people who have been shooting baseball and wishing to make improvements. I am going to share how I got this image. Take what you can use and don't quote this as gospel, it just gives me decent results.

This image was recorded at 9:48 PM under the lights of the ballpark at 3rd base about 28 rows from the field. White balence was preset so that I did not have to fuss with it in post.

Camera Nikon D100
Manual exposure with a center weighted meter setting
1/1000 at F/4
Exposure comp -2.0 EV (Allows the camera to be set for the faster shutter to stop the action)
800 ISO
Lens 70-200 VR F/2.8 with a 1.4X teleconverter

The image was shot in RAW and under exposed on purpose to not blow out the uniform of the hitter. I wanted to bring that back on the computer.

I used levels to bring the correct exposure to where I wanted it and created an unsharp mask layer on the player only. I sharpened the uniform to bring the player off the background a little more. I blured the base layer to mask some of the noise due to the high ISO. I also used a Dfine noise plug in to help mask some of the noise.

I flattened the image and saved.

Hope this helps some people who have been asking me about my baseball shots.