Camera Labs

I went to the local parks football fields to finally try my hand at some sports shots and was lucky to find a league skirmish getting ready to start. After asking both teams if they minded if I took pictures (they said sure) I set up.

I was using my Quantaray 70-300mm lens for all shots, manual focus was rough but I got good practice. Sadly budget lens = budget quality pictures and on top of that for the 1st half I was setup facing the sun and the camera seemed to have a rough time with that and even though I had the lens hood on you will see a good amount of lens flare. It got better in the 2nd half when I moved to the opposite side of the field and set up with the sun at my back.

Anyhow equipment was Nikon D40 set to the "sport" preset, Quantaray 70-300mm manual focus lens, lens hood, mono pod (camera would have gotten hard to hold at the ready if not for the pod) and a bottle of water (to drink) I did all my post processing with Google's Picasa and out of the 372 pictures I took I uploaded just over 100. I used Picasa because it was easier. You may also notice alot of sharpening and this is mainly because as I said before I was using manual focus and well being new it was very hard to zoom and focus fast enough to capture the action however I think I did ok. So tell me what you think.

This will take you to the set.

and here are some teasers.


***NOTE PICTURES REMOVED FROM FLICKR***

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/brate/
Nikon D40 w/18-135mm, Quantaray 70-300mm
Adobe Photoshop CS2 w/Eyecandy Plug in, Paint.Net (Open source Photoshop clone), Photomatix, Google Picasa.

Nice shots Brate, especially considering they were manual focus. I know that's not easy, although sometimes it can actually work out better than an AF system that's either too slow or getting confused all the time.