Time Lapse Basketball Images

On Saturday I took my camera along with me 

to record one of the tournament basketball games 

 in which Ty's team was playing.

I haven't had much time behind the camera lately,

so it felt really good to be creative again.

These images, and the ones I will show you tomorrow

were shot with a very high ISO (3200)

and were handheld.

I did have to run these images through a 

noise reduction program,

but on other images I just left the grain...

you will see that tomorrow.

If you notice, in the image below you can see the progression

of the basketball towards the basket during a foul shot.

I did this by setting the drive on the camera to continuous shooting...

set the exposure and locked it,

made sure you could see the shooter and the basket

in the viewfinder and made sure to zoom out a bit

so there was room for the ball to still be in the image 

at the top of the frame.

The camera took 4 shots in the time it took the shooter 

to shoot the ball and for it to go into the net.

Back at home, I opened all 4 images at once in the RAW converter, 

tweaked exposure and contrast

to all 4 images at the same time to make sure the images

still maintained the same exposure.

Then, I opened the images in Photoshop

by stacking them.

With all 4 images aligned in 4 separate layers, 

I left the bottom layer at 100% opacity for the base layer.

Then, I masked off the rest of the layers,

revealing only the basketball in each of the other layers.

I then flattened the layers, cropped to trim off any 

raw edges created during the stacking and alignment process,

and viola!

The next image was done in a similar fashion,

however, for this image, 6 images were taken.

The layers were opened together in the RAW converter

as the above image, tweaked,

then stacked in Photoshop.

The only difference was 

instead of masking off the other layers,

I let each layer shine through just a bit

so you could see ghostly movement in the final product.

If you look carefully, you can see the referee coming in from the left...

the shooter's hands up from shooting the ball,

a player walking off the court in the background, 

and the other players' heads turning to watch the ball.

Two similar techniques with two very different results.

I hope you liked checking out these two unusual images.

Tomorrow I will post some regular images and you 

can see Ty doing his thing ;)

Have a wonderful Tuesday!