First Time Shooting LL Baseball as Semi Pro

[Tom]

What am I inaccurate on? You have a profitable model that is used elsewhere.

It is a lot easier to make a wage when you have many more games being covered, therefor more exposure.

[LSCSN.com]

It is a successful model true, but I don't have a lot of folks that are out shooting each week, especially after football season. Truth be told I would probably make more money if I did not use this model, but I have other reasons for using it.

My point was you can make a living doing it if you know how to do it and you don't have to have a team of people working with you. There's a TON of work that goes into making it successful but it's possible if that's what you want to do.

[sawyer1206]

Originally Posted by webtech

Your baseball pics are shot from the wrong vantage point. These kids are little so you need to be on your knees. Your shutter speed is way too high which is what is making the faces go dark under the caps. Don't sacrifice the face for the background blur.

Photos one and two I am on my knees. I am 6'2" and all my height is in my upper body. I wish I could get lower but I am NOT going to lay on the ground.......maybe I should just shoot bigger kids! LOL

I really couldn't imagine stopping down the lens to lower the shutter speed. I always shoot wide open to blur the side line/bleachers. Nothing irritates me more than a busy background in a sports action shot.

[sawyer1206]

Online communities like this one are so awesome!! After taking some of the advise I got here I opened a raw image and did a little tweaking to the color of photo #2. I hope everyone will agree that the newly edited version is better...I hope!!! So the question now is how do I get images with this kind of color at the time the image is taken. I like Photoshop but I don't want to have to edit every image I take.


The original image



The edited image

[Tom]

Photos one and two I am on my knees. I am 6'2" and all my height is in my upper body. I wish I could get lower but I am NOT going to lay on the ground.......maybe I should just shoot bigger kids! LOL

Why not? Darren Carroll was doing this for the UT@A&M game on Thanksgiving game this year.

College Football: Texas at Texas A&M :: Austin, Texas Portrait, Lifestyle and Sports Photographer Darren Carroll

(I'm the guy in the Aggie hat behind Mack Brown in pic 25 and 26.

[linque]

Wow, you got Diana and Thomas to respond. Nice. I would listen to anything either of them have to say on technique! (No offense to other posters, I'm just more familiar with their work.)

If you're shooting RAW, you have to edit every image you want people to see, unless you're going for that low contrast, washed out, soft look. Try Lightroom or Aperture(mac only) instead of Photoshop. It's really easy to batch process images using those tools. For example, if you have a series of pictures that have the same exposure and white balance, you can edit one and apply those changes to all of the others. I like to do selective sharpening in Lightroom, so I actually do touch every image. It's probably way too much work considering I only shoot for my son's team and don't make any money off of the pics, but the parents seem to enjoy them, and I have fun doing it.

You could also shoot in JPEG or RAW+JPEG, and let the camera decide the sharpness, contrast, and saturation for you. I like having more control personally, but I'm not shooting to make money either so the time it takes for me to post process isn't costing me (my wife may disagree).

[dminton]

Originally Posted by Thomas Campbell

(I'm the guy in the Aggie hat behind Mack Brown in pic 25 and 26.

Good thing you didn't point this out over at SportsShooter.

After all this

[sawyer1206]

Originally Posted by Thomas Campbell

Why not? Darren Carroll was doing this for the UT@A&M game on Thanksgiving game this year.

College Football: Texas at Texas A&M :: Austin, Texas Portrait, Lifestyle and Sports Photographer Darren Carroll

(I'm the guy in the Aggie hat behind Mack Brown in pic 25 and 26.

Thomas,

Those are all great shots, I really like that the field itself is hardly visible in most of the shots. makes it seem like he was on the field when he took the shots. I am able to get similar results when shooting football if the field has a nice high crown and I shoot from my knees. I guess I will have to get comfortable laying down or learn to use a 90 degree view finder!!