Today's plan - Rocky Gorge v Schuylkill Exiles - Part II

OK, followup on Saturday's shoot.

It was cold, as expected. The parka was essential. I used all of my rain gear to protect the cameras.
I didn't have any protection for the monopod, so it got trashed when it got in the way of a rugby player. OK, that's an exaggeration. The player fell into me, I moved, but the monopod didn't.
The bottom leg of the monopod was sheared off. Have written to the manfacturer to see if I can replace just that piece. Spent the rest of the game using the monopod with my cane chair behind the try zone, where it's shortened height suited the cane chair perfectly.

Shooting manual worked a lot better than expected. Once I got the exposure right, I didn't have to change it much. The dark, dreary day resulted in slow-ish shutter speeds, so, in the resulting photos, you see raindrops streak across the frame. Nice! Not expected, not planned for, still nice.

My D7200 continues to give me problems. At times it just stops auto-focusing. The answer is to turn the camera off then on again, which is a nuisance, and results in clusters of images that are not in focus which you have to skip in post. Poo.
It is still not as fast as the much-older D2H, so it is jarring to switch from one to the other.

I used the D2H with the zoom lens, the 7200 with the 300 prime on the monopod.
This was I was able to use the D2H to get some closer shots (the try line) with the zoom lens.
Conclusion? Somehow I need a *third* option, so I can shoot action that is coming at me.
I need to try something like the Nikkor 24-70 2.8 zoom for the really close work.

For post-processing ("post") I have started using Lightroom.
I hate learning something new from scratch just to get the shoot done, but Nikon has changed the software that I used to use so it doesn't work with the D7200 , and the replacement software (Nikon View-I, Capture-D) just can't handle the capacity. So Lightroom it is.

So I have to learn to import the files, add ITPC data during import, rename them to use my convention, etc.

Then learn how to mark the files I want to skip and pick the files I want to focus on.
The process now has me looking at every file (1500+) and marking the rejects. Then delete all the  rejects. From the hard drive (all those failed auto-focus shots).

Go through the files again, mark the ones you want to look again.
Filter things so you just see the marked 'good' shots. (1 star)
Edit (Lightroom "develop") the good shots, mark them as better (2 stars).
Run a slideshow of the 2 star items, while marking the keepers as 3 stars.

The three star shots should be your hero shots.
Export these as jpgs. Move these to the Google drive for safekeeping and sharing.

Things I haven't figured out yet -
how sync with LR on iPad so only the hero shots are copied to the iPad?
I don't want to see the rejects there.




The pictures were posted to Facebook and shared with the FB group for this team.
I've gotten hundreds of likes for the pictures, with two guys using their picture for their profile pic.
So, a successful shoot for a couple of hours in the rain.