Friday, May 23, 2008
There was a 30 minute intermission between the conclusion of the Northwestern vs Syracuse game and the start of the Penn vs Duke game. I used the time to review my shots of the first game on camera and delete the bad shots. I've talked with several other photographers and so far I seem to be in the minority with this practice. Maybe it's because I'm trying to streamline my post processing. I'm not sure...
As I'm shooting an event I tend to review my photos during timeouts or other periods of inactivity. This helps me in a couple of ways. First off it allows me to review my work as I take it. If I find that my exposure is a little too much I can make some EV adjustments to help me better meter. If my white balance is a bit off I can make adjustments there as well. Lastly it greatly reduces my post-processing time because I'm working with fewer images on my computer.
Most of the other photographers I've worked with use a combination of PhotoMechanic and PhotoShop to post process. PhotoMechanic is really efficient at loading in hundreds of photos and displaying them in thumbnail view. As you scroll through an index of the photos in PhotoMechanic you can tag the ones you like and bring them into a photo editor. Most people use PhotoShop as their editor.
This process works pretty well and it allows you to keep all of your photos from an event. That's a good thing because you can archive them off and come back to them at a later point if you need a picture of a particular player for some odd reason. I'd probably give that approach a shot except I'm very accustomed to using Aperture as my editor.
Aperture wants to manage your entire photo library. It has the concepts of projects, folders, and albums, and it allows you to dump photos into those buckets. It also can do nifty time slice things like "stack all the photos based on time." Aperture will then go through and identify when you were shooting in continuous high speed mode and take all the like photos and put them together in a stack. You can then go through and pick the one you like and tag it as the representative from that stack.
Aperture 1.5 was a dog from a performance standpoint. Aperture 2.0 is much better but is still a bit slow for some things. I'm hoping that 2.5 will bring a lot of improvements and will get me out of the desire to use PhotoMechanic and PhotoShop for post processing. I don't know though...
Anyhow... as I shot the Duke game I ended up deleting most of the photos due to poor lighting conditions. The lights are certainly better than Ludwig Stadium down in College Park but they were still pretty dim. I shot at ISO 4000 and was only able to get around 1/500th of a second before I was getting too dark. Duke's black uniforms didn't help my situation.
In the end the Quakers ended up winning and I was happy to see that. The Penn Quakers have never been to an NCAA Championship game and it was great to be there to see that. If you'd like to read more about Duke vs Penn in the 2008 NCAA Tournament and see my gallery you can click over on the DC Sports Box.
