Driving the Beach

So my latest batch of photos. I tend to work in batches from what I can tell. My last voyage took me to the nearby shores of Wildwood, NJ. Irish Weekend was in full force along with the classic car show on the boardwalk. I took photos of this event years ago (about two or so) with good results, and have yet to dig them back out of the archives, so the new ones will have to do. Enjoy.

Some of the challenges that I had faced during this trip was the crowd factor. To those who aren’t familiar, the “crowd factor” is what happens when everyone wants to see exactly what you are photographing and manage to get in your way in the process, hardcore style.

Of Dogs and Baseball

The other night I went on an annual outing. Its the same almost every year. I know, I know, but you don’t. I am speaking of the Big Ball Marathon, held in Middletown, DE. It is a charity event that consists of local businesses and their teams, and the MOT (Middletown, Odessa, Townsend) who plays softball through the night.

I had the opportunity to take some photos, as usual, and of course everyone wants a copy. This time, I ran into a few problems along the way, and I would like to share how I fixed some things up.

I was using my D70, which I had recently gotten back, a day before the warranty expired…I shot with my 100-300mm Quantaray lens, made for a Nikon mount. I have not had superb results with this lens in the past, but good enough to use with strong light. I figured with running bases and being far away, it was my best choice. Wrong! I also did not have my external flash unit with me, that was mistake number two. High ISO setting contributed to the grain issue.

After it was all said and done, I ended up with grainy pictures. Really grainy pictures, and I don’t mean that nostalgic super film grain that people wank all over. After trying to do some post work on the “recoverable” photos I found a method that works enough to fix up.

Having all of the images in RAW helps. A lot. To fix grain, do this:

1. Open the image in Photoshop. With camera RAW adjust the image exposure down. Down, you say, won’t it be dark? No. Just do it. Then take saturation and contrast and turn em up, NOT ALL THE WAY, but higher than they are.
2. At this point you wont be able to see the image, which is how it should look. Press OK, or Open, or whatever button it is to continue to the next step.
3. Go to Filter->Render->Lighting Effects. Adjust the spotlight so that the ground and bottom are illuminated but not a super-lot. This works well, with ground level baseball at night because the sky IS DARK.

Now, I don’t totally endorse all of this, it is merely a discovery. I suggest the following, if you are in the same boat as me:

1. Ditch the shitty F4.5 lens for a more expensive model. You get what you pay for, mostly.
2. LOW ISO
3. Be good at what you do and learn from mistakes such as the above stated.

Here are some of the fixed/choice picks from the other night: