Cougar Country Nadirs Premiere Softball April 20th 2016

The Cougar Country Nadirs Premiere Softball team played in the first playoff game of the Spring 2016 WSU Intramural (WSU IMs) season. The game was played at the Valley Road Playfields – Field C. We were the home team. Unfortunately we were playing very shorthanded. We only have eight players going against a team that we had not played before. As it turned out the team was a bunch of hitters. I lost count of the number of balls they hit to the fence. They also did have a couple homeruns. It made for a long night as the Nadirs were eliminated from the playoffs in round one.

I was unable to play due to my recovery. So I decided I would try to take photos. The fields were lit with field lights. It is not incredibly bright. I talked to my friend Dean Hare about shooting these photos. As far as shutter speed I had read that 1/500 is the slowest I would want to go for sports. I asked Dean what ISO setting I should use. He suggested I needed to use the one that would get me the photo. What I found was that with a shutter speed of 1/500 I used an ISO setting of 10,000. Even then the photos were still sort of dark. What’s worse is the photos are pretty grainy. This was my first attempt at doing such a shoot and I found the results are not quite what I would have hoped for. There are a few photos in this collection that I like but overall I feel like they are too grainy and too “snapshot-ish” for what I would have liked.

As I mentioned already these photos were taken with a shutter speed of 1/500 sec (mostly), ISO-10000, and various focal lengths. I used my Canon 70D with a Canon EF-S 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 IS STM lens.

WSU Football Spring Practice – April 7th

I made plans to get some photos today but I wasn’t sure what I was going to get. I was thinking possibly some sunset shots, but it was far from sunset. I wanted to go to the CUB on the WSU campus for lunch and to work on my column. I figured it would be a great excuse to be on campus and get some photos of some buildings. I would like to get pictures of buildings and views that will be going away. For example the old WSU Fire Station (currently used as a police station) will be razed (partially) for an expansion of the Fine Arts building. The Stadium Way/Main Street entrance to campus was updated with new rock walls and signs. It is very nice.

I digress.

I walked out of the CUB towards the roof of the Terrell Library. It has some pretty nice views and happens to overlook the WSU football team’s practice field. As it turns out they were practicing. I grabbed my camera and started to take photos. After a few minutes a guy shows up and lets me know that I am okay to come to the field and take all the photos I want but they are asking I do not take photos from the roof. Live and learn. The man said they were going to be going to Martin Stadium soon. He gave me a roster and invited me to come on to the field and get some action shots.

I went down to Martin Stadium and started to take photos. This was my first time using my camera to do sports. I was learning as I was there. Due to the lighting on the and the low sitting sun I had to change my settings a lot. My goal for the photos was to have action shots that froze the action. My camera can do 1/8000 of a second for a photo.

Overall I found when I was taking a photo of action taking place in the bright sunlight I had my exposure time between 1/1250 sec to 1/2000 sec with ISO-400. Some of them were taken at with an exposure speed of 1/1000 sec to 1/1250 sec with ISO-640. Most of the photos I took in the shaded areas had exposure settings of 1/640 sec to 1/800 sec with ISO-800.

The majority of my photos were taken using my Canon Zoom Lens EF-S 18-135mm 1:3.5-5.6 IS STM. A couple wide angle shots were taken with my Canon EF-S 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 IS STM.

The photos in the gallery are a sampling of the photos I captured. I hope that I can get better at getting the good angles for sports shots in the future. Unfortunately several rad shots were ruined because I wasn’t in the right spot when the photo was being taken so I didn’t get the detail I wanted.

Snake River Canyons and the Palouse Hills

This afternoon I took a trip to Lewiston, Idaho. I decided to take the scenic route home and get some photos along the way. I drove on Wawawai Road up to SR194 and into Pullman. Along the way I stopped to get some photos of the canyons and rolling hills.