Do you shoot?

A couple of thoughts, if you'll permit me.

Cropping isn't the issue. Cropping poorly is the issue. Cropping because you did a bad job shooting is the issue. Crops that cut off body parts at joints supposedly makes viewers feel like something is missing, that you've effectively made your subject an amputee.

Cropping such that your image loses necessary breathing room is a problem. Cropping should be purposeful, intentional. Not willy-nilly. In fact, all of your shooting and editing should be purposeful and intentional. Have a goal when you shoot and let that goal dictate your entire process.

 

Here's the old photo thread we had before this one... some good stuff in there.

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/42383/


Also, a nice golf package from the Austin American Statesman: http://photoblog.statesman.com/lake-travis-high-school-wins-boys-state-golf-championship

Additionally, if you're interested in learning more about flash, there is a great creativelive workshop coming up: http://www.creativelive.com/courses/speedlights-101-mark-wallace. Mark Wallace is a great teacher about small lights, and it should be three really info-packed days. The concept behind creativelive is that the classes are streamed live for free, and made available on DVD for a price. Definitely check them out.

 

What's the best way to clean up pics in harsh light? My post-production work is limited; I know levels, brightness and contrast and I'll saturate a little.
Golf is my favorite to shoot. I took these at the state meet last year; there's a lot I would have liked to have back, but I was still in the first couple months of owning my d7000, which was a huge upgrade from the D1H I was using before.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.205840986118844.44759.155393814496895&type=3

 

Can you share an example of the kind of photo you're looking to edit?

 

I delete the raw JPEGs, but if you look at the link you can see how some of the pictures have a haze on them and it's from me over contrasting them.

 

Just use high pass in Photoshop, because it looks so cool!!!1 OMG! (kidding)
Do you use curves at all to bring out the blacks and whites? That has been a huge help for me, along with other color correction things. Lighting has always been my biggest issue. These links Audrey is posting are serving quite useful.

 

Rhody, mostly I see a lot of fairly flat color, not much contrast. Is this because you found the originals overly-contrasty and elected to tone it down? I just want to make sure I'm addressing what you feel like the issue is.

As for the curves solution Matt referenced: here's a couple of good articles on creating an s-curve in the tool to enhance contrast, particularly contrast in individual color channels:

http://pizzabytheslice.com/use-s-curve-for-eye-popping-images-photoshop-tip.htm

This one's a bit more technical, but incredibly informative: http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/curves/curves_3.php

Someone post an image and let's talk about it.

 

I've used curves, but then I started goofing with levels.
My problem is I have no idea what anything does. I take an image and if the levels need adjusting, I adjust them. Then I adjusting the brightness, then the contrast, then I saturate.
When I shoot stuff on especially bright days, I end up dropping the brightness a bit to take away glare, then do the same with the contrast. If it sounds stupid, it's because, as I said, I have no idea what I'm doing post-production wise.

 

I'll get rocks thrown at me for admitting this while at the same time considering myself a competent photographer, but:

I frequently pull up Curves in Photoshop and hit "auto." Probably 60 percent of the time, it looks great to me. Another 30 percent of the time I'll follow generally what "auto" does, but add in my own tinkering. About 10 percent of the time Auto doesn't do shit and I'm on my own.

On my own, I frequently add contrast. Sometimes I'll add saturation (which "Auto" in Curves doesn't do anyway). I can handle Photoshop well enough, but I'm sure I could do my photos a lot of favors if I really sat down and dug deep into it.

 

Definitely read through those links. One of the things to keep in mind is that adjusting your curves is going to adjust your contrast. You can make those one step.

 

For our All-Area awards, we have every athlete and coach come into the office for a photo shoot so that each photo looks similar (background, lighting, etc.). For our spring stuff, we're doing double exposure with two flashes setup about six seconds apart with the shutter staying open the whole time. I can't post an example of what the ones in print look like until they run later this week, but this gives you an idea in the meantime, except the faded bg shot will be done in some form of athletic pose (I was used as the guinea pig):



Something I thought would be cool for baseball/softball is to setup some plexiglass (to protect the photog) between the subject and camera, take a glass ball and have the player take a swing and have it explode everywhere with the light from the flash reflecting off all the pieces. You could use fruit, but I think the lighting could be really cool with glass or ceramic.

Has anyone tried anything like that before?

 

How would you protect the batter?

As for your pic above. Hell of an idea.