Round Rock v. Tacoma

[throdown]

I had an opportunity to go to the baseball last night and took my gear. Was able to get some, IMHO, nice shots of good baseball action. But just can't seem to lessen the noise in the background...any thoughts? Shooting with both my Alpha 33 and 850. Any tips would be appreciated...using iPhoto as my post processing software...thanks in advance.

PS...later in the evening I had to raise my ISO to 1600, and then 3200...so I guess I probably answered my question right there...duh!

[crbeveri]

what lens were you shooting with? Other than the noise and the exposure I think you got some good captures. I am not a baseball fan but what I can see from the shots I know what's going on. Some of your images look flat also.

[John Godwin]

Howard there may some things you can do when you take the pictures. I cannot see the Exif data so a guess as to what could be changed cannot be made.To help out there it would be nice to see the EXIF data on the photos. It could be my reader does not read Sony files. Try to post photos with the exif intact. Some software will strip the data when editing the photos. If the software strips the data then you can put it in the post manually.

Another option might be a different noise reduction software program. Here are a couple of your photos after a quick and painless effort with Lightroom.

It is hard to see and work with such small files and with the full size file the results might be different but I think you can see the possibilities with a different software program.

original

Lightroom

original

lightroom

[throdown]

@Chuck...thank you for the compliments. I was using a combination of a 2X teleconverter with my Sigma 70-200mm lens in the series you see here. Most of these images were shot with my Sony 850.
@John, thank you for giving me the suggestion to Lightroom. A little pricey for me right now, but I can certainly see the benefits from the samples you gave me. Those are the kinds of images I'd like to see. As for the EXIF files, once they get into iPhoto, it pretty much strips all of the information away, except if I copy the information--very basic.
Thank you both for the kind words.

[throdown]

Downloaded the free trial of lightroom. Loved it. Will acquire. Could tell instantly that the background was less noisy, and cleaner even at higher ISO's.
I processed all of these with Lightroom, and hope that the EXIF information is still with it.

[John Godwin]

I still do not see the exif data.

Now that you are playing with Lightroom be sure to learn how to sync the photos. Once you learn what parameters for a particular ISO to reduce the noise and not make the picture like plastic that is the time to sync all of the photos. It is slick.

The batch processing is an awesome tool.