VolleyBall Blues

[mpkirby]

Beach512 wrote:

> Nice shot! I love how you captured that moment and the expression on your sons'
> face is great! We all can relate to that. It is nice to see a "real life" moment shot.
> We can only shoot so many pictures of flowers, fire hydrants, dragonflies, buildings
> at night, etc. before we all cry ENOUGH!! Thanks for sharing this! Hope to see
> more soon.
>
> Dave


I suppose then I am obligated to provide the following image:



This was at my company picnic. The individual in question had just gotten smashed in the face with a volley ball. I was shooting in continuous shoot mode, and following the ball. Sometimes you get lucky.

Some criticism (easy with this one).

1) Too much motion blur. I should have made it a faster shutter speed (1/200 or higher)

2) Over-exposed on the face. Learn that under-exposed action shots can be recovered in photoshop, but overexposed are toast.

3) I shouldn't have been facing the sun (the original had a "haze" to it...I exposure balanced in qimage). Of course, had I not been facing the sun, I wouldn't have gotten the shot.

Mike

[philgabe]

Mike:

I don't know if it's my computer screen or the resolution on my laptop, but the volleyball picture seems way oversharpened to me. I was wondering if you tried to save some of the motion blur with additional sharpening? If that's the case I would have left the background unsharpened (or more modestly sharpened) and done additional selective sharpening on the faces.

To help over-exposed areas, you could try the following technique (it may not work if the areas are so over-exposed that no information is recorded), but it may work....

1. select the overexposed areas (feather a bit)
2. copy
3. past as new layer
4. use "multiply" mode and play with the opacity.
5. if necessary redo all these steps a second time

To bring back details in areas that are underexposed do same but use the "screen" mode instead of the "multiply".

Otherwise, cool stuff!

Philippe

[mpkirby]

You are right. I did apply a sharpening filter to it. Given the background, I probably should have applied it to just the foreground. I'll try excluding the tree from the sharpening filter.

Look for an update in a day or so.

Mike

[mpkirby]

Here is the updated volleyball picture. I don't think it made a huge difference. Perhaps its the jpeg artifacts (because I was shooting in continuous, I used jpeg, not raw.

It also could be the down-sizing for the monitor. I didn't use any fancy resolution conversion.



Mike

[philgabe]

Hey Mike, I really cannot tell the difference either, but then I'm using a rather poor screen (my office laptop IBM 240). This screen just sucks totally to view pictures.

Philippe

[mpkirby]

Hmm. Perhaps on the original it would be easier to tell. In the second one, there was no sharpening on the tree. I use a low sharpening setting in the camera as well.

Mike

[gerry]

nice capture, but i would have cropped a lot tighter

left out those distracting company men in the background.

this picture pleads, crop me!

[Leighow]

MIKE

My reaction to the first picture was -- not knowing that you had sharpened -- the weird look of the foreground tree.

I had noticed the same condition on a leafless maple tree that I was viewing at about 15% size. That tree's thin branches looked all broken-up -- as if the sky had moved on the light spots. In fact I thought that the camera had a problem.

But zoom in, and (to my relief) every single branch and branchlet was captured in continuous detail.

I bet that on the 3 ft x 2 ft blow-up, the leaves on the foreground trees are in great shape.

Interesting! Very interesting!!

HOWIE