First attempt at shooting baseball

A friend asked me to shoot a little league game for him so I headed down early Saturday morning.

I was standing along the first base line with a 70-200 2.8 and 1.4.

1.

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They look a tad underexposed to me but I could be wrong. Other than that they're nice looking shots. Not bad at all for your first try.

I agree with Dave. They look a bit dark.

Exposure Time: 1/640 sec
F-Number: f/4.0
Exposure Program: Aperture Priority
ISO Speed Rating: 400
Lens Aperture: f/4.0

You could have dialed in a bit of exposure compensation, which would have lightened up under the bill of the helmet on the batters.

I'd also shoot from a lower position - I shoot youth baseball from my knees, or sometimes sitting on the ground. it cleans up the backgrounds and opens up the faces nicely.

The shots are also a little soft. I would have bumped up my ISO to 800 and moved the shutter to 1/1250. 1/640 is a bit slow for baseball, even at this level. Some of the softness may be from motion blur. Your timing on the first shot is great. With a faster shutter speed and a little + EC, this would have been a stellar image.

I did a quick edit to this image with a curves adjustment, boosted the saturation to bring out the colors and did a quick sharpening through USM to give you a different look. Hope you don't mind. Couldn't do much with the sharpness, though.

The histogram for the first image is shown under the edited shot below (this is the histogram before I did the edit - the post-edit histogram would look a little better). You can see most of the info is contained on the left side of the histogram, which indicates a lack of highlights and points to an underexposed image.

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dmwierz wrote in post #3442072
I agree with Dave. They look a bit dark.

Exposure Time: 1/640 sec
F-Number: f/4.0
Exposure Program: Aperture Priority
ISO Speed Rating: 400
Lens Aperture: f/4.0

You could have dialed in a bit of exposure compensation, which would have lightened up under the bill of the helmet on the batters.

I'd also shoot from a lower position - I shoot youth baseball from my knees, or sometimes sitting on the ground. it cleans up the backgrounds and opens up the faces nicely.

The shots are also a little soft. I would have bumped up my ISO to 800 and moved the shutter to 1/1250. 1/640 is a bit slow for baseball, even at this level. Some of the softness may be from motion blur. Your timing on the first shot is great. With a faster shutter speed and a little + EC, this would have been a stellar image.

I did a quick edit to this image with a curves adjustment and a quick sharpening to give you a different look. Hope you don't mind. Couldn't do much with the sharpness, though.

The histogram for the first image is shown under the edited shot below (this is the histogram before I did the edit - the post-edit histogram would look a little better). You can see most of the info is contained on the left side of the histogram, which indicates a lack of highlights and points to an underexposed image.

I don't mind at all. I post to get feedback to improve and learn. Thanks for taking the time to do this. It really helps a lot.

I'll try this next time!

BTW I checked out your sportshooters page....OUTSTANDING shots!

Here's another workup

tried to bring back some color and depth using hue/sat & levels - added some contrast & sharpened

Great job for your first time out!
You must know the game - nice timing on the ball...

Long sleeves in June? Bummer....