Unknown Player

[PhilM]

Just recently got a new camera (Olympus E500) and have been playing around with it a little bit. Went to a minor league baseball game the other day to check out some young talent and decided it would be a good time to get some experience with my camera. Got this shot below, let me know what could be better/different. This is my first post and first picture submission, but I've been reading and learning for a little while.

My thoughts on the photo:

• The original photo was very dark and the right side of the image stayed a little too dark during post production.
• I kind of wish the player had their bat resting on the ground or something to make it jump out that much faster that it is a baseball player.

Also played around with it in Photoshop, and I like the way it turned out with the antique feel.

-Phil

[wattsbw2004]

Well im kinda new myself but I think I qualify to say welcome to DPS. I really like the the 2nd pic because it really doe's look like it was set back in the old days with that kind of film I think you did a fantastic job with the color version. As far the 1st goe's im not to fond of it because of the amount of noise in the shot. If possible could you post the metadata along with the shot so as to tell you what settings you could change.

[PhilM]

Thanks for the comments and the welcome. I see what you mean about the noise in the color version. That is probably a result of the shutter speed/aperture not being appropriate for the lighting seeing as it was later at night and I was trying to take some pictures of the picture without getting much motion blur. I saw a shot and snapped it without changing the settings and tried to compensate afterwards in post production. By this time I had also switched out of RAW mode so that I could fit a few more shots on my card so I lost some of the post production flexibility.

Here are the settings I had the camera on at the time:
Focal Length: 45mm
F-Number: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 100
Shot in Shutter Priority Mode

-Phil

[jdepould]

How much post-processing did you do? There really shouldn't be that much noise at ISO100.

[PhilM]

I did a fair amount of post processing because of how dark the original was. Here is the original, unedited photo(Link). I'm guessing that the noise is a result of having to compensate for the darkness of the photo. I should've slowed down the shutter speed before taking this shot, but, like I said earlier, it was a spur of the moment shot taken while I was trying to catch the pitcher in motion so I didn't think to adjust the settings. The noise works for the antique shot at least, so not all was lost.

[wattsbw2004]

With quite a bit of knowledge with programs like photoshop I know what it's like to have that noise there with the darker shots. Great shot none the less, you made it work with the color change

[jdepould]

Originally Posted by PhilM

I did a fair amount of post processing because of how dark the original was. Here is the original, unedited photo(Link). I'm guessing that the noise is a result of having to compensate for the darkness of the photo. I should've slowed down the shutter speed before taking this shot, but, like I said earlier, it was a spur of the moment shot taken while I was trying to catch the pitcher in motion so I didn't think to adjust the settings. The noise works for the antique shot at least, so not all was lost.

Better solution in my opinion is simply to bump the ISO. dSLRs aren't like point & shoots, they shoot at higher ISO numbers, 200 or 400 would've been fine for 1/60 @ f/5.6. If your camera has it, try setting the Auto ISO and see how you like it. I usually keep mine to a minimum shutter speed of 1/60s and max ISO of 800.

[soxboston]

I prefer the second shot to the first. Much more interesting and since the original photo was dark anyways, it doesn't have such a big impact in terms of noise, etc. Sometimes adding noise to antique looking shots like that can make it look even better (older). Maybe try it and see how it looks.