Vintage baseball

Most people know baseball as the game with the large gloves and the small hard ball. When playing baseball according to the 1860 rules, the most striking differences with today’s baseball are: the players wear no gloves, the ball is pitched not thrown and when a run is made this player rings a bell. This is the interesting scenario for today’s fieldtrip.

At the George Ranch Historical Park a vintage baseball game was scheduled for today. For nearly 200 years, the George Ranch is a working ranch. Today, a section of the land is reserved for the museum. The museum is divided into four sections i.e. 1830’s, 1860’s, 1890’s and the 1930’s.
This we take today for granted, weren’t available in the 1830’s, like a water inside the house. Every days live was quite different from today. For a start, nails were so expensive, the wooden elements for the fence was just laid on top of each other (without nails)








Usually it's OK to wait until you'll see the action in the camera's viewfinder. However this won't work for a sport game like I went to today, because then you'll be always too late. The ball already left at the other end of the image before you can even push the shutter. You might think: “Just use continuous shooting.” When you are shooting RAW each photo is about 12Mb. Therefore you can shoot 6 photos, and then the camera switches to 3 shots per second. More expensive cameras can do more shots per second, but still this large number solution is not perfect. An interesting technique is to shoot with both eyes open. The concept is that one eye has the overview of the entire field (the wide angle view), where the other eye keeps the camera on target (the zoom angle view). This needs a little practice because your brains are not used to this way of watching where there is a large difference in what each eye observes. In practice it works like this. Suppose you’re between the home plate and first base. Your right eye looks past the camera at the pitcher, where your left eye, while looking through the camera, keeps the focus point on the batter. When the pitcher throws the ball, you can start the continuous shooting and most likely you’ll get the ball in the frame before you’ll go past the 6 shots.





Attending the vintage baseball game, felt like being the movie 'Field of Dreams' with Kevin Costner.

Usually the meal at a museum is a rip off. So when the cashier asked me if I would like to buy a ticket for a lunch, I thought: “I have to eat something.” The meal was however a pleasant surprise. It was of course a 19th / 20th century meal. Therefore there weren’t any fries, but beans and meat. There was more than I could ever eat.