Lucky shot

Sometimes I guess I'd rather be lucky than good. I was assigned to shoot a pair of baseball games as Tracy and West High schools played in the first round of playoffs. That means shooting two baseball games back-to-back. The trick is to try and make the pictures look different form each game.





I really lucked out on this one. West high was the second game and the falling light was going to be a problem. I tried to get enough shots before my light disappeared altogether. I got my usual shots, pitcher, batter, and then locked on to the second baseman in case he made a play on a groundball. This is a manual follow focus shot as he dove at a sharply hit grounder that just passed by his glove on the diving attempt on the stop. There is one more frame in the sequence but the ball is just too far out of the frame for my liking. For all you camera techies this was shot with my Canon Eos 1D Mk II camera with a Canon 300mm f.4.0 lens with auto focus off but image stabilization on. Exposure was 1/1600 of a sec at f.5.0 at the ISO sensitivity setting on 1600.