Tips for photographing baseball?

DanPower

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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:

$1204_boomerangs vs uni_027.jpg$1204_boomerangs vs uni_028.jpg
$1204_boomerangs vs uni_120.jpg$1204_boomerangs vs uni_048.jpg
$1204_boomerangs vs uni_334.jpg$1204_boomerangs vs uni_172.jpg
$1204_boomerangs vs uni_173.jpg$1204_boomerangs vs uni_511.jpg

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.
 
Backgrounds at baseball games is always going to present a bit of the problem, it's just the nature of the park setup. If you can, try shooting through the fence behind the catcher straight on at the pitcher, it also gives you a cleaner look at the bases, as you mentioned, but you can also use longer lenses through the fence. Don't start using photoshop to fix the images, learn how to clean the backgrounds up in the camera, it will take some time, but there is always a clean background somewhere, just means you'll have to really look for it. You were a little late on some of the action and well, but that comes with practice and understanding more of the game. Baseball is a waiting game, some days you'll get action and the other 99% of the time very little will happen, try not to fall asleep while waiting. Enjoy being there and keep at it. You're on the right track.
 
Thanks for that, the backgrounds have been a real PITA for me.... every time I get something decent, there's something wildly distracting in the background. I got a shot yesterday of a guy taking a catch, you could see the ball landing in his glove... was really happy with it except there's two fat shipping containers in the background and they ruined it :(

I was mainly looking at learning background blurring in PS to fix the ones I already have, not for the future.. longer lenses are down the track so I have to learn to deal with what I have now at least for the next month or two. I was looking at the 70-200 either canon f/4 or Sigma f/2.8 but they're 50mm shorter than what I have now, so I've actually been looking at the canon 100-400 4.5-5.6L but I'm not really sure at the moment. I can hire both of the canon lenses though so I think I'll try both, thing is I shoot mainly snow sport so baseball isn't the greatest test of the lenses for me LOL :)

Here's some from the second game I went to:

1. $1204_untitled_18.jpg
2. $1204_untitled_26.jpg
3. $1204_untitled_46.jpg
4. $1204_untitled_60.jpg
5. $1204_untitled_69.jpg
6. $1204_untitled_83.jpg
7. $1204_untitled_118.jpg
8. $1204_untitled_195.jpg


I think I got a few better positions at this one and the background was a bit nicer, the colours seemed richer at this ground too. #4 would have been better if I'd been on the umpire's left shoulder... I can't really get directly behind him, the scorers at most grounds sit there so I can't get in their way. That's about as close to straight-on as I can get to the pitcher..

And as you can see from the first two photos, first-grade local baseball in Australia is hardly an athlete's sport :D
 

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