Baseball Pictures

This Spring Kyla played baseball (technically t-ball) through Issaquah Little League.  She had a lot of fun and I had a lot of fun taking pictures of her having fun.

As with basketball, when I was taking pictures of her games I decided to get shots of the entire team and not just her.  I was happy to do it because I'm already there with my camera and it gets me more practice at sports photography, plus the other parents seem to appreciate it.

I'm finding sports to be one of the most enjoyable things to shoot.  The photographer has to be very active, constantly moving around and zooming to get the best perspective, and freezing action makes for very compelling images.

When it came time for the team pictures I was asked to take them, which was exciting because it felt like my first "gig."  During one of our practices I gathered the whole team together for a group shot, and then pulled the kids out of practice one by one for individual shots.

Kyla was my guinea pig for the individual pictures as I wanted to try it from several different angles.  I found that having her stand with the sun to her left and slightly behind gave me the best lighting (this was at around 6:00).

I shot each kid both with and without flash with mixed results.  I meant to use it as fill flash to reduce the shade their hats put into their eyes, but I didn't do any manual adjustments to the flash power and it overexposed a number of the shots, though I corrected them in Aperture after the fact.  I need to spend some more time learning the settings on my Speedlite.

I'm not very happy with the team picture, mainly because they look too spread apart.  I tried to compress them when I positioned them, but apparently I didn't try hard enough.  I'm moderately pleased with the individual shots.  The kids were very patient with me as I tried to get them into the right pose (I'm sure they're pretty practiced at this) and I shot them all at f/2.8 at 70mm so there is a nice background blur and the facial features are properly compressed.

In the end the parents seemed pleased with the results, however I'm guessing they wouldn't feel free to criticize me since I did this for free.  Hopefully I'll get the opportunity to try it again sometime with the advantage of having a little experience under my belt.