College Basketball feedback?

[Mule]

This forum has been helpful as I wrestled with lens decisions and flash photography. I wanted to show a few shots from last night and get some feedback. I shot these without any flash using my 50 mm 1.4, at 500 or faster and ISO at 1000 and 1600. My best shots came from under the basket but probably because I spent most of my time there and the 50 mm required I stay close to the action. Running the auto focus was challenging. I was using center spot metering on my D80 but if it didn't catch the principal and instead was hung up in the crowd I got an out of focus image. The narrow dept of field on the 1.4 lens didn't help. So for the second half I switched to manual focus. I still missed some of my shots but overall I think I fared better.

Your comments or suggestions are always welcome.

[dhyravy]

Nice captures man! I think a little Noise Ninja on the 1600 shots at least and a little Unsharp Mask in PS would help out. Don't be afraid to push the ISO to get a brighter exposure and keep the shutter speed up. Any noise will be far less apparent with a good exposure, if the shot is underexposed at all (especially if you have to bring it up in PP) it tends to really show the noise in the shadow details. Still some great shots though.

[JSPhoto]

Well not bad at all for the 50mm, the only one that seems odd is #3 as the color appears off , and it definately doesn't have same lighting as the others. You have some very good timing on these

JS

[Mule]

Thanks for the feedback. I don't have Noise Ninja yet but will look into it. And I didn't do too much with these images yet.

And the question of the day is why does Photo Shop use "Unsharp Mask" to sharpen an image?

[livin4lax09]

no clue. no one i have ever talked to is really sure.

[JSPhoto]

PS & PE both have Sharpen and Unsharpmask, they both sharpen but they work very differently where Sharpen affects all pixels unsharpmask only affects specfic pixels. That was from one of the PS designers a few years back. They said how you adjust it is how it decides what pixels get changed and how... ie: you can just as easily remove sharpness with unsharpmask.

JS

[morganfam7]

Really nice shots! I am a beginner and I shoot high school sports.

The answer about unsharp mask is that the name goes back to film. In a nutshell, you would make a mask that was "unsharp" so that the focal point of the image appeared to be sharper.

More than you want to know about it is here.

Earthbound light has a shorter explanation along with tips on how to use PS's unsharp mask. Really good stuff.

Again, nice shots! I hope I can get some shots like these when we start up again after Thanksgiving!

[Mule]

JS & Morgan, Thanks for the background information. I'm new to digital so every lesson helps. This is a good link for others who are interested.

[livin4lax09]

good explanation morgan. makes sense.

[gryphonslair99]

I can't speak for the Nikon 50mm lens since I shoot Canon. You might leave your ISO around the 1600 mark and shoot at say f2.0 shooting for a shutter speed of 1/250th. That's fast enough to freeze the action, still give you nice bokeh and if the Nikon lens is anything like the Canon version, it is going to be just a touch soft wide open.


Shot with Canon EOS 40D at 2007-11-21

Not the most exciting shot from the other night, but an example of what I am talking about.
Camera - 40D
Lens - 85 f1.8
ISO - 1250
F-stop - 2.8
Shutter speed - 1/320

Photo was white balanced and resized in CS2.