Posted on

Play Ball!

I love baseball. There just isn’t more to it than that. Ever since my Dad and I went to the the Denver Zephyrs back in the ’80’s and played catch in the backyard, I’ve loved the game. While I watch the games on TV, there is just something more special about being at the ball park; makes you feel involved in the game in a sense. I also had this rosy view since my buddies and I were on the club level at Coors Field, where the ushers open doors for you, and even take your food and drink orders (!) while you sit in a PADDED seat and watch the game. I couldn’t resist bringing my camera and making some images, all the while realizing that sports photography and wildlife photography are very similar in many aspects; you have to wait for that ‘peak of action’ moment, long lenses, fast shutter speeds, and infinite amounts of PATIENCE (which I lack). But even for the impatient, the perfect moments still show up from time to time. Now, back to baseball; I have been a fan of the Atlanta Braves since the ’91 World Series. I watched them lose the World Series to the damn NY Yankees too many times, though my focus in the recent years has been the Rockies especially so since TBS stopped airing Braves games on cable. Though to see my teams play each other on a particularly nice Tuesday evening, re-kindled my love of the game even more. I would have been happy with either team winning, but the Rockies pulled it off to win 5-4. Here’s the actual results of the game.

Posted on

Rock n’ Roll, baby!

Okay, so this is a little out of the Wilderness Hunter’s realm of photographic experience. I am not usually an event photographer, but when my Dad asked me to shoot a concert he and my uncle were playing in, I couldn’t say no! In fact, it really got my creative juices flowing, as well as presenting a challenge. The concert was a tribute to a musician friend of my Dad’s that passed away a couple of years ago, and tragically, was only in his mid-fifties. The setting itself was in a small stage room at the Walnut Room in LoDo, and proved a major challenge to shoot, because of the darkness. The camera meter kept reading only the black of the shadows and not much of the light, so shooting in manual mode was a must. Even at an ISO setting of 1600, the fastest usable shutter speed I could get was was 1/6th with the aperture wide open between f/4 and f/5.6. This setting worked well to expose just the lit parts, even though the camera wanted a shutter of 2 seconds in aperture priority mode. I use the same method to shoot the moon (except a crescent like here). The problem was the guys kept moving around! Just kidding of course, but  it was a chance for me to practice an action photo technique known as peak of action. Basically, instead of shooting a stream of images at a high frame rate, you watch for the pause in the action and make the click. This works well if you have a camera with a slow frame rate (like mine) and have used quite often shooting wildlife; which just proves to me that no matter if you shoot landscapes and wildlife, the same techniques can be applied elsewhere. Here’s a couple of shots from the evening.