Baseball Action

Last evening I went to the second Keene Swamp Bats game of the season. The Swamp Bats play in the New England Collegiate Baseball League. This league is modeled after the much older “Cape League” and is designed to allow college players to keep their eligibility. That ‘eligibility’ may be a concept that is rapidly fading into history given recent developments / court cases. However, I have not paid much attention to this if the truth be told.

To me, going to a Swamp Bats games represents good, inexpensive, outdoor entertainment; pure and simple.

Since Joan had other obligations yesterday evening, I went solo, took my camera and roamed the field looking for good vantage points from which to capture the action.

I made roughly 900 exposures, mainly in small bursts, trying to get the ball in the frame and to freeze the motion*.

I usually try to keep things to a half-dozen photos per post but have failed abysmally today. Thus, with my apologies, here are seventeen of those photograph.

All-in-all, I had a good time and learned a bit about how to photograph baseball.

* Warning!!! Photographer talk ahead…

I selected 88 frames in my initial pass though those images and processed 67 of them to make finished photographs. I had a difficult time in whittling the final selection down to those shown here. I have omitted all of the pre-game festivities and many other ‘nice’ photographs so as not to bore my treasured readers!

My camera has two continuous modes, a “low” at 5 frames per second and a “high” at 10 frames per second. I discovered the low speed mode was too slow. There was rarely a ball in the frame when photographing around home plate. The high speed mode worked better. I was able to get a frame or two that included a ball before it ended up in the catchers mitt and sometimes a single frame with the ball in it after the batter made contact with a pitch.