The pic request was action from a Darts Tournament, during the practice sessions early on Saturday. It was to include some of the local regulars at this annual tournament, and at its usual venue at a leisure complex at the "Holiday End" of Sheppey.
Here's the request:
DATE: Saturday, June 4
TIME: 10-11am for practice. Event starts at 12pm.
PLACE: Merlins, Leysdown, ME124RB (01795 xxxxxx)
EVENT: Sheppey Darts Classic
CONTACT: Organiser Tony Cox 077xxxxxxx
CATEGORY: Darts
SLUG: SP CLASSIC
REQUIREMENTS: Pics of players in action. Maybe best to do when practicing, as no flash during play.
Local players pls, names such as Paul McDine, Geoff Harkup. Norfolk
Tony Cox will help if need any.
More after the break...
Weeeell, saw this and thought "Hmmm, Merlins - dark, dark dark. Flash will look rubbish because there is minimal ambient, and I don't think it will go down well even for practice. So we won't use flash. D3 time."
(Just to add to that - the only time available to cover it was practice, and as it turned out the local "names" mentioned weren't there on Saturday, anyway - best laid plans of reporters etc etc. Mind you, This wasn't too bad a day, actually had time to think at and between jobs!)
I picked my D3 and 300mm lens out of the boot to go in, as I guessed I wouldn't be able to get close enough to use short glass too. And indeed, it was dark, and the boards were so close together that I wouldn't get close, so if anybody was playing in the middle of a line of boards I had got some reach.
With the help of one of the players, I got pictures of six locals, all in nice action poses, but because I had got a little time, I tried to be a little creative despite the gloom. Organiser Tony Cox had said I was welcome to go up on stage, which gave me a head-on view of the boards there (result! Thanks, Tony!) and I got the image below after a bit of shuffling about and waiting for the right pose...
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| Sheppey's Mark Legg, eye on the prize! Mark won £125 after being knocked out in the last 16. Not a bad day's work! |
Now, the highest shutter speed I saw, even at Hi-1, was 1/400th, so I needed to wait for the players to hold steady for an instant. The gap between the boards was tiny: that's the edge of one adjacent board on frame left. so it was shuffle left, shuffle right as each player took up position.
Once the rest of the day was done, the sports pics were opened in Aperture 3, selected and captioned, then it was adjustment time.
I love Aperture 3 but it's biggest failing, compared to Lightroom 3, is that it has no dedicated Noise Reduction. Oh, there's a slider in the raw processor and another in the adjustments bricks, but they don't really achieve much when there is serious image noise to deal with, and there is noise from a Hi-1 D3 raw file that has to be dealt with. I've used Noise Ninja as a plug-in, and it does work, but it's never seemed terribly logical and I always struggled to get it to work as I wanted.
So, with a Terakopian (http://photothisandthat.co.uk/) Nik software webinar coming up, I downloaded and tried a trial version of Nik's Dfine 2. It's free, so nothing to lose...
Now, and wow! Dfine 2 IS logical! AND it works very well indeed! With a visit to their website (http://www.niksoftware.com/index/en/entry.php) for a quick video tutorial, I sorted out this and 10 other images on Sunday morning.
I love doing sports photography, and I like to be challenged a bit to get pics like this, to get something that looks a little different, better, than "local paper fare". I love my two D3's. Probably more than is healthy. Even at Hi-1, there's noise, but there is detail in the pics that nothing, nothing, other than the even-better D3S can beat. I love Aperture 3, and adding Dfine 2 has made it better still. (I've added the rest of the Nik Suite after that particularly persuasive webinar, too... !!!)
Love, love, love my job on days like these...
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