DanPower
TPF Noob!
- Joined
- May 7, 2012
- Messages
- 81
- Reaction score
- 6
- Website
- www.danpower.co.nz
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Hi all, I've been taking some shots at the local baseball games lately, they've been ok but I was hoping for some tips and tricks from people who shoot baseball regularly or just know more than me I don't know much about the game so I'm finding it fairly challenging to get good shots, and the ones I am getting don't really seem great.
I shot the first two games in manual mode and found that a bit difficult as the light changes a lot so I shifted to shutter priority for the last two games, which did help a lot. I'm using the kit 55-250mm canon lens and I find the autofocus slow and inaccurate, so I've been mainly using MF and trying to pick my shots before they happen. I used a lot of AF at the last game and threw away most of the images, and the good ones still looked softer than normal..
Shooting positions are obviously limited by the screens although the one advantage of the kit lens with it's 58mm barrel is that right up against the chicken wire it almost fits through the holes, so I can shoot through the fence fairly well. But a lot of my shots are taken from just outside the dugouts (or in them if the team is feeling charitable).
I'm looking at a faster 70-200 in the near future (I'm renting a canon f/4 to test drive at next weekend's game) which I hope will help with the AF issues and will also help me to blur backgrounds more, but does anyone have any advice for me that might help get the general level of my images up? I'm not doing it for the teams or anything so it doesn't matter if I get good shots or not but I'd like to get my keeper rate up a lot higher than it is. Currently I'm around 20% which I'm not happy with at all, although as I said I don't know baseball so a lot of my discards are because I thought something was going to happen and it didn't...
Here's some examples from the first game I went to:
So what I'm mainly not happy with are the cluttered backgrounds, which I think are partly to do with the kit lens only going to around 5 or 5.6 at these lengths and simply the location of the field... I can't really move the buildings in the first two shots and the fencing isn't going anywhere either. If I could blur these out I think they'd come up better, so tonight I'm going to learn to blur backgrounds in PS. It looks relatively easy but I've never tried it so tonight's goal is to learn.
Other than that, what do you think I should be looking at working on next game?
Thanks heaps guys.
I shot the first two games in manual mode and found that a bit difficult as the light changes a lot so I shifted to shutter priority for the last two games, which did help a lot. I'm using the kit 55-250mm canon lens and I find the autofocus slow and inaccurate, so I've been mainly using MF and trying to pick my shots before they happen. I used a lot of AF at the last game and threw away most of the images, and the good ones still looked softer than normal..
Shooting positions are obviously limited by the screens although the one advantage of the kit lens with it's 58mm barrel is that right up against the chicken wire it almost fits through the holes, so I can shoot through the fence fairly well. But a lot of my shots are taken from just outside the dugouts (or in them if the team is feeling charitable).
I'm looking at a faster 70-200 in the near future (I'm renting a canon f/4 to test drive at next weekend's game) which I hope will help with the AF issues and will also help me to blur backgrounds more, but does anyone have any advice for me that might help get the general level of my images up? I'm not doing it for the teams or anything so it doesn't matter if I get good shots or not but I'd like to get my keeper rate up a lot higher than it is. Currently I'm around 20% which I'm not happy with at all, although as I said I don't know baseball so a lot of my discards are because I thought something was going to happen and it didn't...
Here's some examples from the first game I went to:
So what I'm mainly not happy with are the cluttered backgrounds, which I think are partly to do with the kit lens only going to around 5 or 5.6 at these lengths and simply the location of the field... I can't really move the buildings in the first two shots and the fencing isn't going anywhere either. If I could blur these out I think they'd come up better, so tonight I'm going to learn to blur backgrounds in PS. It looks relatively easy but I've never tried it so tonight's goal is to learn.
Other than that, what do you think I should be looking at working on next game?
Thanks heaps guys.