More Baseball - Tough Lighting

I had a chance to shoot my own team yesterday as we were playing a "mean nothing" game in our round robin (both teams have been eliminated from championship contention). It was fun as we pitched some kids we don't normally pitch and the other coach even played his 8 year old against our 12 year olds.

Lighting was challenging as it was beautiful, sunny and warm, but that made for harsh shadows and then shadows on field from surrounding trees and the like. I struggled with exposure and sometimes the harsh lighting seemed to cause focus issues...not sure if it was that or our orange uniforms. Anyway here is a selection...I'd appreciate some tips from Dennis and other pro ball shooters on getting good exposures in bright, sunny conditions like this, with then shadows creeping in.

1.

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And here is an example of some of the exposure challenge...what is the best way to shoot this and not get so much shadow under his cap. I shot this with 2/3EV on my 40D, but it is still dark. Or should I bump this up in PP to wash out background more and get the light under cap?

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Your exposures look pretty darn good to me!

What did you set your speed at to freeze the ball?

Thanks Manutd...that's probably because I posted the good ones here!

Jennifer: EXIF should be embedded but I shot in Av mode at f2.8 and ISO anywhere from 200 to 1600 depending on the lighting and time of game. This made for varied speeds. Last photo above, boy in green, is at 1/2000. Shortstop in orange making play earlier is at 1/4000. Generally as per other advice on here I try and keep speeds at 1/2000 or higher as light permits.

Cheers!

Chris

What metering mode were you using?

Evaluative Metering, Av mode, AI Servo, center or left point AF depending on orientation.

I suppose partial metering or another setting may have helped but I forgot all about changing those settings to see any difference.

nice job getting faces on all the batter shots... #2 is a shot that
I love to get.

Chris, you did well. Actually, late afternoon lighting can be wonderful. I was working a tournament this past weekend, and for about 30 minutes, we had amazing light somewhere around an hour before sunset. It was coming from the side and almost made the images look like portraits. If the subjects are backlit, this can be a real challenge. If the subjects are totally in the shade, you can expose for the players and the backgrounds might be blown out.

When things get this challenging, I'd be in Manual exposure mode, and just monitor your LCD and histogram. It's not easy, that's for sure. I sometimes will stay in Av and have boosted my EC as much as +1 1/3.

As far as post processing goes, I'd keep this to a minimum. Get as close as you can in-camera.

Something you can do is to select the face (including the part under the bill) with the magnetic lasso, then do a curves adjustment or even a shadows/highlights adjustment on the selection. Tread lightly, though. This adjustment needs to be subtle otherwise it'll look artificial. Done properly, it can recover the image to approximate what you actually saw at the time the image was captured. I never, ever, recover shadows more than a +20 with the S/H tool. Performing the adjustment on the face only minimizes the chances of blowing out the rest of the image.

I gave it a go below, but it's tough to deal with an image that has already been "Saved for Web" - the color depth has already been reduced. Maybe you'll get the idea. I did a very gentle curves adjustment to the entire image, then selected the face and adjusted the curves on this selection. It's a little flat and shows some signs of highlights being blown, but again, there's only so much one can do starting with a web-resolution image.

Hope this helps,

Dennis

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manutd101 wrote in post #5732776
Your exposures look pretty darn good to me!

I agree.

bobbyz wrote in post #5737336
I agree.

+1

Dennis, Great tip

Nice shots.

My favorites: #2 and #4. Great timing!

Thanks Everyone for the comments and Dennis for the exposure and PP tips. I usually just adjust thing in Lightroom and avoid any detailed processing in PS but that sounds like a pretty simple solution. I also use the LR Web building program for posting my images to a web site (it has some nice easy to use templates) and it automatically generates (exports) the JPEGS needed. I don't "officially" use "Save for Web" but I guess essentially that's what it does when it converts the raw files.

Cheers!

Chris