Passing the ball

Post-processing can be a necessary evil for photographers, and I’m so far behind in mine lately that I have three full shoots sitting on the laptop waiting to be edited – one of them since last summer.  I need to constantly prioritize what gets looked at next, and inevitably it’s the family-related photos that are getting bumped down the to-do list, with the shots I need to catch up on including two of my sister’s performances and one of my brother-in-law’s rugby matches. Last night I felt guilty enough about this to process one more shot from Darragh’s match, and tomorrow I’ll follow up with a shot from one of Úna’s performances.  Both will be accompanied by promises to process the rest of the shots as soon as possible – but that may not yet be soon, sadly.

The treatment I chose for today’s photo is similar to what I used previously – a blend of different exposures from the same RAW file to give a pseudo-HDR, but attempting to keep it photo-realistic.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether I achieved this, but regardless I am still liking this style of processing for this subject matter.

I opted for a black and white image this time (with a slight sepia tint – something I’m drawn to for monochrome for some reason) for two reasons.  Firstly, it’s been a while since I posted a black and white image, and secondly, while I like how these rugby images are turning out in colour, and liked the colour version of today’s image also, I’m trying to avoid a scenario where the finished set comprises images which all look the same.  Mixing colour and monochrome images will help add a variety to a set of images where the subject matter inevitably has a sameness to it.

The exposure for this shot was optimized for sports shooting – i.e. I aimed first for a fast shutter speed – and the lighting is all available light, but crafted and shaped in post-processing to be much better than it actually was on the day by the post-processing technique used.  The ability to (sometimes) turn bad light into good like this is why post-processing may be evil, but is almost always necessary.