Tag Archives: baseball

Tampa Bay Rays

I’ve lived in Tampa for nearly two years now, and I must confess that during that time I’ve never taken the initiative to go to a Tampa Bay Rays game. So, when I got the invite from a friend it was the only push I needed. It was a good game, and the Rays walloped the Angels 11-1.

Tampa-Bay-Rays

I’m always envious of the sports photographers with their huge and expensive lenses. I can’t compete on that level, so instead I took a low res photo from my point-and-shoot and had some fun with it (see below).

To do this yourself with, for instance, a landscape of a city or a mountain range, all you have to do is the following:

How to Create Spheres in Photoshop:

  1. Start off with a wide panorama such as the above. If you can use one that is full 360 degrees that is even better.
  2. Under Image Size, uncheck Constrain Proportions, and match the Height with the Width.
  3. Rotate the image 180 degrees.
  4. Under Filter, choose Distort, Polar Coordinates, and in the resulting dialogue box choose the “Rectangular Polar Setting.”
  5. Use the Clone Stamp and/or Burn tool to clean up the line where the two sides join.
  6. In the case of this example, I also used the Marquee tool to select the area of the sphere I wanted, then did Select – Inverse to get rid of the exterior part of the image. Remember, you’ll need to Unlock the Layer to get a Transparent Layer.
  7. As you can see, I also added an additional Layer of baseball threads.

Tampa Bay Rays

Comment on this post if you ever end up doing something fun with these simple Photoshop tricks.

Go Rays!