Netball save

[garyr]

Hi folks,

Looking for a bit of help with this shot please....been taking some shots of my kids at netball and I am struggling. Here are two versions - the first is straight out of camera, shot on L jpeg, all manual settings (was chimping my settings when I accidentally got this shot) and with jpeg I am afraid I may not recover the exposure. The second is a crop with some basic adjustments. Any advice or suggestions on a better crop and what to do with the exposure?

Straight out of camera - just resized via DPP:


Cropped with a few basic adjustments in CS3:



Shooting Netball is really quite a challenge. Mostly I spray-and-pray with 6.5fps, but this shot (which I hope can be saved) was a single shot - so it has shown me that I need to anticipate my shots better, and a couple of good ones will beat a heap of wishes. Either my 40D, my eyes, or my monitor suffers with that amount of red in the uniforms too. So much to learn!

Any suggestions, critiques, and advice is welcomed and greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Gary

Edit: fixed image links

[PiroStitch]

If you can, use Lightroom and you can still have control over the exposure, etc. otherwise in photoshop, use curves (Image -> Adjustments -> Curves) and instead of creating an S curve as the one I mentioned in this post, create one point in th emiddle and drag it up and to the left a bit. You should see the brightness increased. To gain a bit more contrast, create another point to the left (to control the shadows) and drag it down a bit. Hope you get what I mean.

Also the cropped version is better as it creates more of a focal point. The original had superfluous space around the main subject or subjects in this case.

Great work and great capture. Dont' worry about using the spray and pray approach, you have to start from somewhere Just keep practising and before you know it, you'll develop your own approach and continue to make it more efficient.

[Pehpsi]

Can't see pics? Me or you?

[Biggzie]

I cant see em either ...

[garyr]

Thanks PiroStitch, appreciate the advice and encouragement - this is the best forum on the net!!

I have placed the pics at another host, so hopefully they will be visible to all now.

Thanks
Gary

[Marvin]

I think the second is much better and I agree about the crop. You could even try a portrait crop and get rid of the girl on the far left. I shoot a bit of netball too and generally (depending on my daughter's position) try to get more on the side of the court as opposed to the end (this also depends on how long your lens is). Your shot seems a bit underexposed but this is easily fixed in photoshop. I would run a levels over it to give it some more "pop" (bring the right slider to the left to meet your histogram and you could take the left slider to the right slightly), mind you, I am not an expert by any means! Sport shooting is definitely about anticipation!! Good luck! PS I don't know if that's your child jumping, but the girl has good air!

[garyr]

Thanks Wayne and Marvin. Appreciate your advice - I trimmed the pic, straightened the horizon, cloned the light out of the centre's head and adjusted the curves and levels. See below for how it turned out.



Thanks again,
Gary

[Marvin]

The final one looks good Gary. It would be good next time to try to get the face of the player facing the camera (much easier said than done, I realise!). Keep shooting and posting!
Lee