The Bike Day

A couple of weeks ago I took photos at Lakeside for my father-in-law. Coming up to the day I was trying to think of what kind of angles to get during the course of the day. 

I thought the best thing to do was to camp out at different corners on different sessions. That way I could limit the amount of time wasted on setting up.

NB: Now I have put a few "dud" ones this time to point out some of the things that I was trying to do at the time

First thing in the morning I thought I'd try and get a few in of the bike....

Without flash... a bit too much shadow....

With flash.... shadow looks a bit fake....

Changed flash angle to behind the bike... better 

Flash again with desaturated green, purple and red... plus throw in heaps of clarity and contrast :)

My first hurdle was trying to get into the flow of panning as the subject passed by and trying to marry aperture and shutter for a desired effect. So in the beginning I tried to get the hang of panning with a fast shutter

1st frame

2nd attempt

Argh Too far zoomed out to get any real detail

Lens focused out at last split second - panned too quickly left at that moment

Better..

So the next portion of the day was to shoot at slower shutter speeds so that I could try to convey a sense of motion in the photo. Now there was a whole lot of frame burning to begin with as my fledgling panning skills were a bit inept to begin with. I started at 1/30th sec but soon realised that the motorbikes were going too quick for me to get a nice sharp(ish) image so I ended up shooting at 1/50th or 1/60th sec, which worked out fine.

In order to use some of the larger apertures, I used a polarising and ND4 filter so that I could get a more shallow "depth of field".

ouch..

starting to get there...

better...

Threw clarity and contrast into overdrive to get this look here

This was one of my sharpest of the day

 In all honesty afterwards I thought to myself if the blurred background would've looked the same anyway if I had left the filters off - but unfortunately didn't experiment with that.

The rest of the day I spent trying different angles on the course and seeing if I could benefit from the afternoon light coming through:

And last but not least I tried to do the desaturation thing again.

P.S. Dont smoke

Az

Under my umberella... ella, ella, ella....

So this week I got my new convertible shoot through/Reflective umbrellas which I found some time to play with tonight.

So I asked my lovely wife to partake in my experimentation with umbrella work and she was kind enough to say yes :)

So using the above setup (1 strobe pointed into the shoot through umbrella and 1 CTB'd  Strobe pointed at the wall to separate the subject) Igot some interesting results...

ISO was set to 200, Umbrella Strobe was sitting at either 1/8th or 1/16th power depending on the picture and the gelled strobe was at 1/8th power. I chose to keep the umbrella close to the subject in order to limit the effect that it had on the background. Also when you put it close to the subject - the relative size of the light source increases, hence softening the light further as David Hobby explains in his awesome, awesome blog The Strobist

So I ended up with a few interesting shots of myself and Shona, first including ambient light........

And then I cut out the ambient and boosted the gelled strobe......

I thought I'd throw in a few extra faces there :)

So yeah - I think I'll be using umbrellas alot more now for profiles :)

Az.

Fluro lights are the bane of my existance

Well I was asked to take pics at a black belt grading at Kallangur a couple of weeks back.

This was a great opportunity to take some awesome high speed shotsso I said yes.

Turns out the environment was a bit like......

Big dimly lit hall with multiple different coloured fluro lights....

So for a black belt grading, where you have heaps of very, very quick movements, you need a faster shutter speed (I tried for 1/500th but it wasn't happening, as black belts tend to cause blurring at 1/250th, so most were at 1/320th or 1/400) and for a dimly lit room I needed a quick, bright lens.

So out comes the nifty fifty yet again to the rescue! Even at f1.8/ f2.0 I was at the mercy of the limited light, so with a healthy boost of ISO at 2000/2500 I was able to keep up with most of the action.

I had already adjusted for the fluros with my white balance.... but at a slower shutter speed.  

My next problem soon came after I started pulling the shutter speed down....

As you could see, I noticed that I started to pick up portions of the cycling light, giving me RED, BLUE, GREEN, RED, BLUE, GREEN etc. Unfortunately I don't have enough access to many, many decent lights to flood the room; Or even strobes that could recycle at ridiculous speeds, so I thought that I could alter the white balance once I get into lightroom, as thankfully both the red and blue tinted pics were uniform in their brightness. The green ones didn't (as you can see above).

Also unfortunately quite a few of the green tinted piccies  that I had taken had the best poses oddly enough.

So I set about trying to fix these "little green monsters" by using an in program grad filter.

Lower half pigment - Argh!

Then with a stroke of genius (or luck, whichever you think) I thought of placing a light purple grad filter over the green side (cause Green + Red + Blue = White right?) and it helped to make them look a bit more normalllller....

Just added the grad filter - needs more work though

Then with a bit of a fiddle with the colour intensity, and a bit of exposure, I managed to save a couple of shots that would've otherwise looked a bit mixed processed if you know what i mean :S..

And here is a few more shots from the day that still need slight adjustments. I'd also thought that a few of these would look cool with a complete colour strip for effect.

Congrats to young max and hope you like the pics.

Cheers,

Az.