Sunday, May 6, 2007
Today was a fantastic day for shooting. The sun was shining brightly and the weather was great! It was in the low 60s and the humidity was very low. The wind was blowing a lot from the front that moved through last night. The azaleas are blooming for the 4th week in a row, and it was great weather for shooting outdoors.
I arrived at the Maryland Baseball game in the 2nd inning. The stadium was packed! It was the largest crowd I've ever seen at Shipley. It makes sense tho - the Terps were playing the #2 team in the country on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon. A great day for a game.
The large crowd made it somewhat difficult to move around. I've gone to a lot of games were the bleachers are empty and in those games it was really easy to change my vantage point without worrying about getting in people's way. The biggest problem I had was the children - there were a lot of them and their parents weren't keeping track of them. They kept congregating around the entrance to the dugouts, which happens to be where I take pictures of the batters, pitchers, and first basemen.
I used my 2x TC for the first part of the game. It slowed the glass down to f5.6 but that wasn't a problem because of all the light. I made sure to adjust the white balance to use sunlight. I also played around with the ISO setting a bit. I took several shots at 200 and the rest at 400. After looking at the pictures at home I can't tell too much of a difference.
When I removed the TC my camera was struggling to keep up with the amount of light coming through the lens. My 70-200mm is f2.8 and I thought that I could slow it down but that doesn't appear to be the case. In retrospect that some sense. I'll have to double check it online.
I messed around with the EV correction and set it to be negative. That appears to darken the image, and that was pretty important for some of the shots. The sun was so bright and the
Terps were in their whites today, so a lot of the shots came out overexposed. When in Aperture priority mode the shutter speed kept going from 1/8000 to "HI". I'm not sure what HI means, but 1/8000 seems familiar to me from the manual. Maybe it's the maximum shutter speed.
I learned about using the <---|---> gauge in the viewfinder today when shooting in manual mode. When in manual mode the little exposure gauge goes left or right to indicate the exposure. If it goes left the shot is overexposed. If it goes right the shot is underexposed. That's pretty useful because you can then adjust the shutter speed. I plan on keeping my eye on this little gauge - I think it'll help a lot down the road.
Overall I found myself shooting in Aperture priority mode for the most part. It was mostly sunny but there were a few scattered clouds. When the clouds covered the sun it became noticeably darker, and in M mode it was difficult to adjust the shutter speed correctly and quickly. I think tho that if it was completely sunny I would have used M mode.
