2010 - Week 35, Manual Focus

Baseball USA
August 28, 2010 5:06 pm
Nikon D90, 70-300 70-300mm 4.5-5.6 VR @ 70mm
Aperture Priority, No Flash, ISO 2000, SS 1/30, f/4.5
RAW, Pattern Metering, Manual Focus, WB in Auto

We were invited to a baseball birthday party. The girls weren't for sure that they wanted to go since it was baseball, but I knew one other girl would be there and I wanted them to try it since they are learning how to hit golf balls.

Turns out baseball was a huge hit and they had lots of fun. I didn't know the layout of the facility and thought we would be farther away from the kids (but still in the same space as them) and only brought my 70-300mm lens as I really haven't had a chance to use it much.

I quickly saw that I was going to have to push the ISO all the way up and I was still going to get slow shutter speeds. Shooting through the netting caused all sorts of focus problems so I switched over to manual focus and picked a place where I wouldn't move so that I could take shots in continuous mode without the camera hunting for focus each shot.

With the slow shutter speeds I got motion blur because the girls were moving as they swung, and I was really happy to have the vibration reduction (image stabilization) even though I was shooting at the shortest end of the focal length.

There was no real reason for me to be in aperture priority, I think I started there because of the variable aperture zoom, but once I saw that I wouldn't need any of my focal length I could have switched back to manual.

I should have thought to go into another cage so I could get shots from the front instead of only the back - but that is 20/20 hindsight for sure.





post-processing
Adjusted the color & luminance sliders in ACR to temper the noise caused by the high ISO. I couldn't eliminate all the luminance noise without sacrificing a bit of sharpness so some noise is still present.