Long Lost N. Kentucky Tourney Photos Found!

By Bill McLaughlin - Cub Reporter, Table Tennis Dayton

Newport, KY – After nearly a year of procrastination and general ennui, the long awaited photographs from the April 2007 Northern Kentucky something-or-other table tennis tournament have finally - finally been processed and uploaded to the world renowned Table Tennis Dayton website.

The Northern Kentucky tournament was certainly well organized and executed and had a number of interesting elements. The level of players were certainly very high, having come from hundreds and in some cases thousands of miles. High level players from Mexico and Columbia attended and did quite well, while other luminaries, including the USATT hall of famer, Dan Seemiller, top U.S. player Eric Owens, and the captivating Petra Sestakova also displayed their skills.

Tournament broadcasting for millions to see

Another interesting aspect was the production of a video broadcast for Kentucky public access television by long-time player and newly-turned television producer Randy Burnett. Approximately three professional video cameras were utilized and were controlled at a main booth by Burnett via headset-microphones. Burnett also provided play-by-play announcement for some of the key matches and recruited this reporter to do some color commentary.

Double-click delays and processing procrastination

"Frankly, I procrastinated and felt a sense of ennui", said cub photographer and Table Tennis Dayton webmaster Bill McLaughlin. "It's a lot of work to process the film. Wait ... there was no film. Well, er ... it's a lot of work to click a 'send' button a buhzillion times." McLaughlin promptly wandered off.

The actual process of processing processable digital photographs involves downloading the lot - well over 100 were taken - then selecting those likely candidates for display. The original file size is way too large to upload without downsampling, so the original resolution of 2816x1880 was converted to the now displayed 500x334. A corresponding "thumbnail" representation of each picture was also created at a resolution of 150x100. This process might have taken eons (instead of 10 months) had it not been for an excellent freeware program called IrfanView. This little gem of an image editing program has an excellent batch mode processor, allowing values to be placed onto the near 120 files, and then acted upon at the click of a button. Therefore the large file was downsampled, sharpened and saved, and another batch mode renamed each file as per date and number. A third batch mode created the smaller thumbnails and renamed them as well. Thus the only true excuse for the nine month delay is certainly stated as above: procrastination and ennui.

As mentioned previously, the original file resolution is considerably higher than the posted resolution. Below is an example of the original size versus the edited size.

Portion of downsampled photo	Portion of original photo

If anyone is interested in the original, unedited photo of themselves, feel free to correspond to bmclaughlin@tabletennisdayton.com. Each photo is approximately 2MB in size so your email provider will need to be able to accept an attachment of that size. In some cases, I used the 'shadow/highlight' feature of Adobe Photoshop to essentially boost the brightness of the picture. The photos were taken with a Canon Rebel XTi and a Tamron F2.8 28-75mm lens. This was my first attempt at indoor sports photography, and though the results came out far better than those resulting from the use of my point-and-shoot Sony DSC-V1, they were still works in progress. Future photo shoots should result in continually better results. In addition to shooting at F2.8 - an aperture size which is not conducive to the sharpest possible picture, the ISO was boosted to the maximum allowed by the XTi to 1600. This introduces a degree of noise, though an amount which is far less than most cameras in or below it's class. The Rebel is excellent at noise reduction in general.

With more tournaments on the horizon, I'll likely wield the camera again and perhaps even play in an event. Afterwards, whether the long ennui ensues remains to be seen. Ennui is evil.

View the event photographs here.

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