I bought a used Nikon D500 to shoot my son pitching. What I actually got was a summer-long lesson in light, patience, and how much of photography happens before you press the button.
Twenty-seven frames from June and July — a kid on a mound, and one very good morning on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Tap any one for the full size.
photos/ and run build_photos.py.
Notes to myself, mostly — the honest version of a steep learning curve.
Almost every daytime frame here was shot wide open at 1/8000 of a second. A pitcher's arm at release is moving faster than instinct suggests — anything slower and the hand turns to soup while the face stays sharp. Grain is fixable in Lightroom. Motion blur isn't.
Look at the settings under these and the 200-500mm is racked all the way out in half of them. It's heavy and slow to swing, which meant I had to decide where the shot was before it happened instead of hunting for it. That turned out to be the actual upgrade — not the glass, the planning.
The evening frames came in at ISO 100. The midday games needed ISO 1800 to 2200 for the same shutter speed. Same camera, same lens, same kid — the only variable that changed was what time we showed up.
The porch shot with his grandmother was taken at ISO 3200 under a porch light. It's noisy if you pixel-peep. It's also the photo I'd grab first if the house were on fire. I spent a lot of the summer being precious about clean files and eventually got over it.
On the Blue Ridge Parkway I finally set the camera up properly for a group shot at 21mm instead of handing my phone to a stranger. Small thing. Big difference in what we ended up with — and it's the only frame all summer with me in it.