Baseball Cards

This year I created baseball cards for each member of Nate’s Fort Collins Baseball Club team, the Lobos. Here’s how I made them.

The first step, obviously, is to take pictures. I brought my camera to two games and one practice with a 100-300mm lens. The first game I just shot haphazardly, but after that I made a checklist of which players I needed a shot of, and planned accordingly. One of my big discoveries was realizing that I had to shot from the opposite side of the field when photographing left-handed hitters at the plate. I did a lot of running back and forth!

The second step was editing. I did some editing using the desktop version of Lightroom, but also used Lightroom and Snapseed on the iPad as well as another app called AfterFocus. AfterFocus (an iPhone app, but it runs on the iPad as well), lets you blur out parts of the background. You select the blurred out areas by painting on the screen with your finger. What this did was allow me to reduce depth-of-field to remove distracting background elements. I could also solve this problem by spending a couple of thousand dollars to buy a faster professional camera lens, but the 99 cent app did the job I needed it to. The border was the easiest part. I used another 99-cent app, Baseball Card Pro.

The last step was production. I used my home printer and Lightroom to print out sheets filled with baseball-sized prints (2-1/2″ x 3-1/2″) onto photo paper. I glued the photo paper sheets onto card-stock to provide stiffer backing. All that was left was to cut them out and hand them out to surprised and excited kids. The looks on their faces made all the work worthwhile!