Trade Secrets: Taking a Chance on Clone Pitching

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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2005-09-12

Trade Secrets: Taking a Chance on Clone Pitching
Mark Goldman's multiple exposure of Chien-Ming Wang is the sixth in a series of SportsShooter.com features called "Trade Secrets."

By Mark Goldman

Photo by Mark Goldman / ICON / SMI

Chien-Ming Wang of the New York Yankees in a multiple exposure with the Nikon D2X against the Baltimore Orioles in a game won by the Orioles 5-4 at Orioles Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Md.

I received a lot of email regarding my image entitled "Clone Pitching" - all asking me how it was done. For me, that is the highest of compliments. The technological tools that are available to our community for us to tell a story are tremendous. Both major camera manufacturers have done a great job of giving us unbridled free reign for creating images that our predecessors may not have even imagined. The tools at our disposal provide us with a great safety net for taking visual chances or risks in bringing a unique view to an event that we cover.

It is easy for us to shoot the same images over and over again with different players and call it a day. We all have our favorite spots where we can make the images we need to fulfill our assignments. We have our "stock" image-types that we confidently employ to meet our clients' needs. You know the ones in baseball: 1) Starting pitcher with ball coming out of his hand, 2) Marquee player - ball on bat; 3) Double play or steal at second, 4) Slide into home. Many times I will see my fellow photographers go to the well, stay for 5 innings, get what they need and leave to transmit without every changing position or angle. How boring!

Think about it like this: If you are bored shooting it, how do you think the viewer will feel looking at it? When you make a good image that is compelling, it is exciting and that excitement comes through to our viewers. With that in mind, I always get the shots I need to fulfill my assignment first, and only then do I start to experiment with different ideas to try and bring a different or unique perspective to the event I am covering. I will do all sorts of things. Like shooting baseball at 1/30th of a second to try and show a sense of movement. Like moving out of the well to high positions in the stands and really bring the fan perspective into the image with the added benefit of a clean background. Like getting as low as I can in the well and putting the camera at ground level. That one foot movement of the camera from eye level to ground level brings a whole different perspective to the game.

With that sense in mind and being a recent owner of a D2X, I thought about the multiple exposure feature of the camera and how I could use it to show something different in shooting sports, especially a sport like baseball where there is a lot of repetitive stuff going on. Like all good photographers who get a new piece of gear, I spent a few days thoroughly reading the manual to understand all of the features of this camera (Yeah, Right! As soon as I got the camera, I charged the battery and took it out.). One of the cool features of the D2X is that it allows the photographer to shoot multiple exposures and save it as a single image. The default number of shots is two. It also has an auto gain feature that keeps the exposure correct through the multiple images being processed.

I thought that it would be interesting to try and show a fielding play, a swing or a pitching motion as a multiple exposure. I tried all sorts of things: shooting fielders, batters, and pitchers. When I started out with batters, I was not pleased with the images. It was not quite what I was looking for. There was too much movement in the batter (bat, hands, arms, feet). So I focused on trying to capture a pitching motion. I had an image in mind of what I wanted the photographs to look like. I wanted to show the extreme arm motion that major league pitchers go through on every pitch.

I put the camera into continuous low speed mode and set the number of frames for the multiple exposure to three. Two exposures did not provide enough image information to make a compelling image and four was too busy.

Photo by Mark Goldman / ICON / SMI

This test multiple exposure of Livan Hernandez of the Washington Nationals at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. did not work out like Goldman wanted it to. Two exposures did not provide enough image information to make a compelling image.

As I quickly discovered through several experimental shots, to make this work, the camera had to be held in a fixed position. I used my monopod and held it in a fixed position, locking the frame by hand, in order to keep it from panning, which would give me an undesirable background blur.

After several test shots, the setting I arrived at was using an ISO of 640. I used a 400mm 2.8 lens and had the camera in the high-speed crop mode, meaning I am using 6.8 million pixel option, which reduces the sensing area (to a FOV crop of 2x) but increases the frame rate to 8 fps. So my 400mm lens had an effective 800mm view. Shutter speed was 1/750 at 2.8 with a +0.3 exposure compensation. White balance was at 5600K and sharpening and contrast were both off. I also used the auto gain feature, which is on the multiple exposure menu on the camera. To make the image I wanted, I shot a total of 3, three-frame bursts. The very first shot of the three is what I chose to submit as Clone Pitching.

The image came out just about as I imagined and hoped it would. I have done multiple exposures in every game and will continue to try and refine the technique. I liked the resulting image and was really pleased that it got the positive reaction from our community as well. I was also happy to have a tool that allows me the creative freedom to make an image that is compelling and a little bit different. Photoshop was minimally used to tweak the contrast a bit so that all three versions of the pitcher could be clearly seen. I also cropped it. If there was any change to the image, I wish that the ball was not partially obscuring the face of the pitcher (left side of the frame).

I will continue to take chances and experiment in making images that both my viewer and I find interesting. Using the D2X, every event that I cover will certainly have a least one set of multiple exposure shots. I'm still working with multiple exposures to capture an ideal image of a batter and I want to nail a pitcher shot. I am really looking forward to seeing what I can do with it during football season.

Mark Goldman is a freelance photographer based in the Washington, DC area. He is the staff photographer for Outside Pitch, a regional Baltimore Orioles magazine and a regular contributor to UPI and ICON/SMI.

"Trade Secrets" is a series of educational features where SportsShooter.com members reveal the inside-information about how they were able to create a specific image (or two.) To nominate an image for this feature, please send a message to the SportsShooter.com admin staff here: http://www.sportsshooter.com/contactus.html The SportsShooter.com admin staff reserves the right to accept, or not accept, any nomination.

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Goldman's member page