Baseline Shot

Brick House vs. Woo-Deux, June 8, 2009
Georgetown Playfield, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 1/250s, ISO 3200
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 and Adobe Photoshop CS4, ACR 4.4 profile

I haven't been playing soccer lately due to a badly sprained ankle. Last week I finally went to one of my team's soccer games, but I brought my camera instead of my cleats. My teammate Daniel is in the Harvard t-shirt, doin' his thing. Can't remember what exactly happened next, but no doubt Daniel hammered the ball to somewhere. (Ultimately we won, 2-1.) I've got a couple other exposures from this game that I like; might post those later in the week.

Exposure was a bit tricky; it was late and the sun had sunk behind the trees, so I had the ISO cranked all the way up. Ideally I'd be shooting wide open and with a faster shutter speed but I wanted to stay at the sharper apertures of this lens. Kinda pointless in the end since the noise blows out all the detail anyway. I tried the trick in Photoshop where you sharpen the Lightness channel in LAB mode, and that helped a little.

I tried this as black and white but I couldn't find a mix that made this look good. The contrast is just too low to make it interesting. Leaving the color in lets the image pop a little bit more.

Next week I hope to start playing again.