Finally captured a volleyball (HS), shot that I think is really worthy of posting with the rest of you. Our girls were in the MN big school State Tourney for the 5th time in 7 years, and this girl is one of our captains.
Pro arena lighting sure is nice (Excel Energy Center).
It's by far my best capture from shooting 400+ shots from 2 matches.
Any C & C on processing appreciated... otherwise thanks for looking.
Pretty nice, have you tried any noise reduction on it yet? I might consider opening it up in front of her just a little , not sure, but she seems removed from the game cropped that tight to the front of the frame.
Like the shot. I just experimented a bit and if you dial down the brightness say -20 or so and up the contrast +5 in CS4 you pull back a considerable amount of highlights and detail and have a much nicer shot, one man's opinion.
excellent shot! i bet you had a lot of fun at the tourney. i was hoping to come down and shoot some but had a work conflict. it would have been nice to meet you.
i might dial down the exposure a bit and up the contrast to darken the background. or in lightroom use the "dark" slider.
Great shot. These make me awestruck at the complexity of hand-eye coordination. The eyes aren't "on the ball" but the brain knows where to tell the hands/arms to be. Amazing!
Thanks for the responses. I guess I see the exposure as pretty "on". Yeah, the background isn't the greatest. I don't have the original here, but I don't remember much room to the left of the ball. this was shot from opposite end of the court under the net.
Grant... yeah, nice to shoot the girls at that level. I post all my albums at Here
After converting from RAW (where I don't think I adjusted the exposure), this does have some Noise Ninja applied at mid-settings. ISO 3200, f/2.8 @ 1/800. Otherwise, a little local contrast (20/40/3), and Max's web resizing.
You don't need noise reduction, and the image isn't "unusable" in my books. You're right, it's a great capture, and that's the hard part really. From there, you just need to tweak the levels a bit and you can turn this into a winner.
Hope you don't mind, but this is literally a 5 second tweak:
... simply by raising the black point a little and dropping the midpoint just enough to add a tiny bit of zip, and NO noise reduction at all. Took honestly 5 seconds. I think this image is way more than "usable", it's fantastic. Nice job.
