Thursday, February 19, 2009

Gettin' to the end of the line

This is what my camera provided as "auto white balanced".... green balanced more likely!




After twenty minutes of color correcting, this was my best effort.





This is my favorite image after adding a layer of a black and white filter over the color image.




Hockey season is almost over. I can tell it by the tell-tale signs in the air. The roads are less hazardous, there is more light at the end of the day, and we're starting to see birds that had left town months ago. Still cold out, mind you... but a day or two above freezing does wonders for the heart in February.

Come the middle of March and hockey grinds to a screeching halt. We have 3 more major weekends of games before we're through. We play the dreaded Camillus team this weekend. Then we have a tournament in Clifton Park. Hopefully, the following weekend we will have another tournament in Canandaigua, but that seems less likely now that we've heard that few other teams have signed up. Might end up being a home game or a scrimmage with a boys team.

In the meantime, I am psyched... waiting for the 70-200 f/2.8 VR lens to arrive from my lens rental place. Hopefully the VR aspect will make it less prone to blurring as I try to capture these kids on the ice! I know I need the f/2.8 end of things. Light gathering in any hockey arena is a bugger. Trying to capture FAST movement is nearly impossible. Hopefully this lens will make things a little bit easier.

3 comments:

klineola said...

Hey Alex. I was interested in that black and white filter. Are you using Photoshop? I have been using GraphicsConverter for a long time and just started trying PhotoShop. Good job on that color. I have found that the digital camera we're using does very poorly in correcting for available light. Especially in fluorescents.

Alex Solla said...

Howdy Michael-

The filter I love using is Nik Silver Effects... it works in tandem with Photoshop. Pretty pricey, but if you like B&W it is the best thing out there. Wicked fast and TONS of options. The hardest part for me is having enough memory in the PC to handle a 300dpi image at full size. Since most of the time I am just goofing around and putting images on the web, I cut that in half and it has a much easier time running the filter on my PC.

Maybe I should do a tutorial on how I use this filter in Photoshop? Think anyone out there would want to see the process I go through?

klineola said...

Well, I would be interested, of course!