Digital Sports Photography

The creative importance of cropping, to remove extraneous subject detail, is as crucial in digital sports photography as it is when working conventionally. But there is a vital difference, for not only does digital cropping reduce picture content, it also reduces file size. Bear in mind, however, that you should not crop to a specific resolution until the final stages of image processing, as "interpolation" may then be required. This reduces picture quality of your digital sports photos, usually by causing a slight softening of detail. Image cropping without a change of resolution does not require interpolation. In general, in digital action photography, at the very least you will want to remove the border caused by, for example, inaccurate cropping when making the scan. This area of white or black not only takes up valuable machine memory, it can also greatly distort tonal calculations, such as Levels. If a border to the image is needed, you can always add it at a later stage using a range of different applications. Image rotation The horizon in an image is normally expected to run parallel with the top and bottom edges of the image. Any slight mistakes in aiming the camera, which is not an uncommon error when you are working quickly or your concentration slips, can be corrected by rotating the image before printing. With digital sports video, this correction is carried out in the darkroom during the printing stage. But since it is a strictly manual process you should not expect this type of correction to be an option available from the fully automatic printers found in minilabs. In digital sports photography, however, rotation is a straightforward transformation, and in some software applications you can carry out the correction as part of the image-cropping process. Note that any rotation that is not 90°, or a multiple of 90°, will need interpolation. Repeated rotation in digital sports photography may cause image detail to blur, so it is best to decide exactly how much rotation is required, and then perform it all in a single step.