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| Photo by Jack Howard |
| Click photo to launch a gallery of baseball and softball images. |
There are hundreds of thousands of diamonds across the U.S. and the world, and every one has its own quirks, charms, and characteristics. There are backstops, fences, dugouts, and eyesore parking lots in the background of nearly every one of them, plus live areas, dead-ball areas, and any number of local field factors that will all play a part in your shooting experience. Other than that, it's all the same.
You've got to find good shooting angles for capturing the action, and you've got to meter correctly. Shoot at maximum aperture to blur the background and isolate the action (which also will give you the fastest shutter speed at any ISO), and time your shoot burst to follow the play from start to finish.
Metering, Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO
Spot-metering in manual exposure mode, off the grass, dry infield dirt, or a player's cheek will give very close to an 18 percent gray value. I personally shoot exclusively metered manual mode, because the exposure will stay the same regardless of what is being spot-metered during the exposure -- whether it's a meter-fooling crisp white or black uniform or the shadowy dugouts behind the scene as the pitcher starts his windup. I strongly recommend this. If you are not quite ready for manual exposure, select Aperture Priority, and select an ISO that gives you a day game exposure of at least 1/800 second to freeze even the fastest moving action. (Then when you're reviewing the images, see if the images are over-and under-exposed based on what's in the frame where the metering was active and adjust your exposure compensation accordingly.)
Set your camera to burst capture mode, so it will continually fire off shots while the shutter is pressed. Set Autofocus to Continuous focus. Set your camera to highest-quality JPEG recording. Skip RAW -- you don't want the camera's buffer to get clogged up with RAW processing during an exciting play.
We highly recommend disentangling Autofocus from the shutter button. Most DSLRs offer an option to switch autofocus to a thumb-controlled button on the back of the camera, so check your user's manual to see if this is possible. We recommend this because it allows the shutter button to control nothing except the shutter, and fire as soon as you decide to fire away -- without possibly searching for focus on the background, which means you'll miss your shot.
Game Night?
Night games present a challenge, as most fields have dismal lighting conditions -- even at the college and pro levels. All of the above holds true, except that you may have to crank the ISO up extremely high and slow down the shutter speed to the point where your images may suffer from both noise and motion blur of the subjects. Often flash is not permitted, but if it is, remember that even a high-powered strobe can only effectively throw light so far. Check with the league and game officials to see if flash photography is allowed. In any event, with night games, our honest advice is to shoot a ton of images, bring an extra card, and hope for the best.
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