Lumberjack’s Photography

[lumberjack]

Correct, he caught a line drive from the batter, head was out of frame for that (and the glove even farther out).

Here’s a previous picture from the sequence:

 

[pantheraba]

That one is very good, too...good catch...by YOU.

 

[Nutball]

Ever take pics of fireworks? It's another challenging one for me because I have to find where someone is shooting them off, get aimed, hope to catch the auto focus on a burst, then keep holding the shutter button half pressed for however long it takes them to reload, then start the exposure as they fire the next shot.

 

[lumberjack]

I took some a couple years ago, nothing inspiring for sure (was well before I got serious into photography).


If I was shooting fireworks now, I’d probably go to F8, ISO 100, a long or bulb exposure, and hyperfocal... same concept as flash photography and lightening on the exposure. Adjust aperture and ISO as required.

 

[lumberjack]

Going through yesterday’s pictures, doing screenshots so the exif data is visible at the bottom:



This is a crop, peep that shutter speed @Nutball @Tim_B.


200% Crop of the ball, he’s good for an ~80-81mph fast ball:


The ump asked me to take some pictures of him and his partner, here’s one of him:

 

[pantheraba]

Wow! And that last one with the focus on the action folks and the ball....excellent.

 

[Nutball]

That's a crisp 1/32000 wow. I remember using the electronic shutter on my camera to see if the power company changed the light pole bulb to LED like they said they would. I was able to then see that it was still a mercury arc bulb.

My camera was set for F8 ISO 80 6-8s for the firework pics, so yeah, what you said.

 

[lumberjack]

How did you tell the bulb type?

 

[Nutball]

Zoomed in, minimum ISO, smallest aperture, and the electronic shutter set to 16,000 or 32,000 I was able to dim the bulb enough to see the details of the light source well enough. Then I matched what I saw to the configuration of a certain bulb used on light poles. I think it had 2 mercury arcs in it, not a filament, or led dots. It was much to warm and pink of a light to be LED anyway.

Even with regular white incandescent bulbs, you can see the filament glowing if you use these settings and take a picture of it, or just view it on the camera screen.

 

[lumberjack]

Ah yeah, makes sense.

An ND filter would help with that as well. I plan on getting some sensor mounted ND filters at some point.

 

[lumberjack]

Got the new cameras in Tuesday... so far they're everything I hoped they would be.

There will be some growing pains in terms of memory cards ($400 each and each camera uses two) shooting 30 50 megapixel pictures per second really chews them up... holding the shutter button down, the camera can fill a 160GB card in just under 5 minutes (writing 9 57MB pictures per second to the card) although that was testing the processing speed, not a practical application. Also they eat batteries maybe twice as fast as my previous bodies... not a big deal, I have a battery grip (two batteries) and extra batteries are fairly cheap, I've ordered 4 spares to remove that anxiety.... dragging my feet on ordering 4 more memory cards.

Here's a picture from Thursday, ISO1600, 1/5000, F2.8 shot with the Sony A1 and 400GM (Sony's 400mm F2.8 G Master lens).

 

[lumberjack]

Here's one from Tuesday night, cropped the width (4:5), the height is still full frame.


A1/400GM, ISO20k, 1/2000, F2.8.

 

[gf beranek]

Unreal! Takes a nice kit and know-how to capture the action like that. Specs / setting. I see them now. Great!

 

[lxskllr]

I didn't realize the balls deformed that much when hit. That thing's got a pretty good dent in it :^O

 

[lumberjack]

ISO2000, 1/5000, F2.8, A1/400GM.

30 frames per second is amazing, the second picture would be my pick of peak action, but all 5 show the ball.

 

[lumberjack]

Got a deal on a 1200Ws battery powered strobe, 25% off and sales tax rebated back, it delivered yesterday. I bought it for shooting an all day pageant, hopefully some strobed action shots, and who knows what else. I haven’t bought the 1200Ws ring light head for it, yet.

Didn’t have anything specific to shoot, so I waited for it to get dark and took it outside. It had no problem lighting something up ~40 yards away at F2.8 and a low ISO (640 or less), so I took it to the other side of the house for a longer target.

Interesting note, 1/200 is the sync speed for electronic shutter. With mechanical shutter it jumps to 1/400 and in crop mode (APSC) it’s 1/500th. It was dark enough for me to see the green LED on the battery charger on the boat 120 yards away, so shutter speed didn’t really matter.


Manual focus, because autofocus can’t work when the sensor can’t see anything. This are low resolution (2MP) JPG exports straight from camera.

A1/400GM, ISO 5000, 1/200, F2.8. Those cypress trees are 185 yards from the camera/strobe.



Switched lenses to give context for the distance/amount of light. The above picture is basically dead center of this picture (including the blown out foreground).

A1, 16-35mm GM, ISO5000, 1/200, F2.8.

 

[lumberjack]

Shot some video yesterday with the new bodies, this is 4k120fps with 1/8000 shutter speed... very little/no rolling shutter. If you're watching on a computer you can use the , and . keys (also < and > with the shift) to advance frame by frame.

Zoomed in and the frame after the ball hit the bat, you can see the bat recoiling/bending forward.

 

[lumberjack]

Shot some high shutter speed 8k video yesterday, here's a screen grab from it... pretty sure I love it. It's limited to 24 or 30FPS on my cameras, but that's still good enough for most things. Bit rate of 400Mbs (50MBs/3GB minute) isn't bad given the 33.2 million pixels with a 10 bit color depth and 4:2:0 chroma sub sampling. That's just shy of 1 billion pixels recorded every second.

A1, 24-70 F2.8 GM, ISO100, shutter speed is something like 1/4000. The fact that this is a screenshot of a video clip is still a bit hard for me to grasp... the ability to capture video with picture quality will offer some interesting opportunities. Digitizing photos is one of my upcoming (personal) projects.

 

[lumberjack]

Two near misses back to back Monday night, the first hit a visiting coach in the leg, the left missed everyone.

A1/135mmGM ISO16000, 1/3200, F1.8

It's a shame the GIF is lower quality unless you open it... but it only gets to 1080P and 256 colors.


34 50MP pictures cropped to 16:9 and put into a 8k video.

 

[lumberjack]

Yesterday was the soft start on a new “feature” I plan on rolling out next season, delivering some action pictures from the field to my subscribers (the people who pay for coverage of their players). These are some of the pictures that were selected in camera, edited (quickly) on my phone from raw to jpg, then sent out on a group message. Pictures from the next game will be distributed using Discord.

More baseball yesterday in Tuscaloosa. Here’s a cool procession; the pitch, 3rd baseman fielding the ball, and out at first.

Out at third:


The younger brother of the above pitcher (the starting pitcher) getting the batter out at first:

Similar play at the JV game with the pitcher underhand tossing the batter out at first, both players are subscribers.


Another JV subscriber, I thought the shadow from the ball on the bat was cool.

 

[Burnham]

Fine work, Carl.

 

[lumberjack]

Been a super busy few weeks between trees and photography, at least compared to the previous months. This are all low resolution outputs, 2048px on the long side. The baseball pictures were edited on my phone on the field and sent out to my Discord server for the bleachers “real time."

Had 5 pageants this past weekend, that was a fun change of pace:



Monday, Tuesday, tonight, and tomorrow afternoon are baseball games.

Monday was a couple injuries, nothing overly serious.
Our short stop cleated their third baseman (and was safe):


Couple innings later, they hit our second baseman in the head... he ended up with a black eye and some stitches... and it was a strike 😂 (tipped the bat on the way to his head).

 

[lumberjack]

Here’s that first picture, screenshot straight out of camera. The lights are on in the room.


The light setup was 2 hair lights, 2 strip boxes on either side in the front, and a rectangular box overhead. Next time I’ll probably grid the hair lights also, and add another rectangular box down low angling up, making for essentially a very large ring light. I’d like to try the ring light for my 1200Ws strobe, but haven’t plunked the money down for it yet.

Used 4 Godox AD200 Pro for the boxes and one hair light, the hair light visible is a Godox V1. Power output ranged from 1/8th to 1/2+.3.


Sony A1/24-70mm F2.8GM, ISO100, 1/200, F8, electronic shutter (I love that I still haven’t heard the mechanical shutter fire), 24mm.

 

[lumberjack]

Thanks. I thought so, but had to ask. It's just amazing to me how light can bend around objects and come into clear focus in an image. Really amazing. Quantum...

@gf beranek

So here’s the trick I mentioned.
Sony A1/400GM ISO125 1/1600 F2.8

Sony A1/400GM ISO640 1/1600 F2.8

There’s an obvious difference in exposure, contrast, and the ISO is 2.3 stops higher. Here’s what’s in front of the lens for the second picture (taken without moving as much as practical).

 

[gf beranek]

wild how it does that. nice kit, too