sharpness in baseball photography

[Karinu]

This is the final image in a pitching sequence (socc). I like it in general but find that I'm missing the overall sharpness & clarity in his face. Any advice is welcome, thanks!

[oldwolf]

This might help us help you a bit more:

Critique Forum Rules

[Phillydog1958]

Originally Posted by Karinu

This is the final image in a pitching sequence (socc). I like it in general but find that I'm missing the overall sharpness & clarity in his face. Any advice is welcome, thanks!

Nice shot.

[Karinu]

Originally Posted by oldwolf

This might help us help you a bit more:

Critique Forum Rules

Yes, Sorry, forgot the EXIF. Here it is: ISO 720, F/5.6 Shutter: 1/1000 240mm & 0 EV.
To clarify, looking for advice on how to get better overall sharpness & clarity across entire shot. His face seems a little out of focus to me in relation to the rest of picture.

Apologies for the half-baked post/critique request.

[JFSanders]

First use a monopod or tripod. Second if you pull this up in View NX2 and click on the show focus point option it will probably put the focus point on his right shoulder and at 5.6 your DOF will be shallow enough to cause his face to be out of tack sharp.

Jim

[mrteacherdude]

Disclaimers first: I have no formal training in this stuff, and I'm not familiar with Nikon equipment. Also - NICE shot!

The lack of sharpness you perceive may be partly a function of your lens. If I looked up your lens correctly, it is roughly the equivalent of a mid-grade lens in the Canon line-up. That lens I have used, and while it typically gave me much better results than kit lenses, it was still not as sharp as I would like to see it, much of the time.

However, as JFSanders suggested, your aperture may be just a little too large to give you good overall DOF of the pitcher. Also, to my eye it looks like your photo is a tad overexposed. Whether I'm right with this I'm not sure, but my overexposed photos always look to me like they are not as sharp as they could be. It looks like the lighting you were dealing with could have been a little challenging for crisp photos without blowing out highlights and/or losing the shadowed side of the face.

Stopping down your lens a little should improve the DOF, but then you might need to bump up the ISO even more than it already is. If the photo is actually slightly overexposed though, you might not have to change a thing other than stopping it down. Also, I have found that sometimes a slightly faster shutter speed has improved my clarity without really sacrificing the amount of light hitting my sensor much when I am shooting outdoors. Even if it looks a little underexposed to me, I can often acceptably brighten it up with post-processing.

I don't know what your normal routine is before taking photos at an event, so forgive me if I mention something that you already do. I recently learned quite a bit about shooting in a variety of challenging lighting conditions, and I found shooting action in open sun to be a bit more challenging than I thought it would be. I took lots of "test shots" of subjects I was interested in from a variety of different angles using shutter priority mode and different ISO settings. I would go through the pics almost immediately after shooting and find the camera settings that overall worked best. Once I determined that, I set my camera to manual and used those settings, took a few more pics and tweaked the settings as necessary and then tended to leave it alone, ultimately giving me more consistent results. This works pretty well if you are remaining in the same place and the action is in the same place. Otherwise, your camera might meter off the scene a little differently each time you push the button.

Lastly, I played with your photo just a little by increasing the contrast and adjusted the levels slightly and it seemed to improve the sharpness and overall clarity. You might give that a try and see what happens. I didn't try a high pass filter (I tend to prefer this over sharpening tools) on it, but that can often help with sharpness as long as not overdone.

Hope this helps and I hope I have not overdone your original request

[Karinu]

JFSanders & Mrteacherdude-thanks. Both very helpful replies. I don't ever find the help I receive here overdone.

Mrteacherdude--The lighting conditions were tough--it was heading toward sunset on a partially shaded field so everything kept shifting. And given the limits of my lens, I think in some ways it may be luck of the draw on getting great overall sharpness while in burst mode for such a high action series. At any rate, I will try your tips for improvement. I have done some better shots in the past and I think the angle I was positioned at may have helped as well--a little more towards head-on.

[Jim Bryant]

What you want to use your lowest f-stop to blur out the distracting background. This is two -fold. One it makes your eye want to travel to the action/subject instead of wandering around the background. Two: shooting at a lower f-stop gives you a higher shutter speed to work with in order to stop the peak action. Remember...get the ball in the frame and in focus.

[Karinu]

Originally Posted by Jim Bryant

What you want to use your lowest f-stop to blur out the distracting background. This is two -fold. One it makes your eye want to travel to the action/subject instead of wandering around the background. Two: shooting at a lower f-stop gives you a higher shutter speed to work with in order to stop the peak action. Remember...get the ball in the frame and in focus.

Thanks, Jim. You always have great advice. I thought I did step down to lowest f-stop (in "A" mode)--when I zoomed out, did the f-stop shift to accommodate the zoom? The ball was long gone in this shot since it was the final in the sequence...at least I know what happened on that account