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flag jpetznick
Posted: Feb 15, 2017 at 7:41 Quote
velociraptor-clintthrust wrote:
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Bought my first DSLR one day, went to a race and got some snaps the next. Any tips?

The first thing that jumps out at me in these shots at least is the framing. I'd like to see the rider in the top half of the frame with a little bit more of the trail and terrain revealed below them.
flag NorCalNomad
O+
Posted: Feb 15, 2017 at 19:39 Quote
guancho-libre wrote:
But I feel like you have used the smoke as the center point and haven't bothered making an interesting shot outside of that.

Dude that's like %99.99 of all colored smoke shots
flag chrispaulcx
O+
Posted: Feb 21, 2017 at 4:10 Quote
Nice Pics J.P.! Dark forests are hard to shoot. Looks like you've done a pretty good job on those shots anyways. Just keep it up. You can always use a remote flash(s) on tripods. I'm by no means an expert on those. I picked one up used at the end of last year and have only tried it. A remote flash can do a good job controlling shadows, and bringing some life back to the colors. It's hard to setup and tweak just right though.

I hope to either take pics as well, or race at the Tuesday race series as I'm somewhat local now.

jpetznick wrote:
I've been into cameras since high school, but just started to shoot biking in the last couple years at the local Tuesday Night Race Series. My biggest struggle so far has been balancing shadows, highlights and colour correction in my post processing. Any tips would be appreciated!

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flag ntd14
Posted: Feb 21, 2017 at 14:46 Quote
jpetznick wrote:
I've been into cameras since high school, but just started to shoot biking in the last couple years at the local Tuesday Night Race Series. My biggest struggle so far has been balancing shadows, highlights and colour correction in my post processing. Any tips would be appreciated!

Your doing well, that first photo is pretty cool. I have the same problem (but my photos aren't as good to start with), will post an example soon. Realistically all you can do is try and use the light differences to create artistic flare.

Basically what is happening is the camera cant deal with the luminosity difference between the over and under exposed areas of the photo. In extreme cases this blows out completely as it has in the sky in most of your photos and is unrecoverable (but can be faked). A quick aside; if you are into landscapes then you deal with it using bracketing, but taking three photos of a fast moving object doesn't work too well.

The two photos side by side, the second I edited using darktable from your jpg. If you dont already, shoot in raw it makes a number of post processing things work a lot better.
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Photo taken from jpetznick in the photo crit thread and some post processing applied

1) Apply a lens correction, the lens you are using appears take quite a lot of correction, the two obvious ones are the barrel distortion and vignetting, this is why the outer areas of your photos look dark/dull.

2) Adjusted the exposure up slightly, 0.18EV and increased the blacks significantly 0.0239. Increasing the exposure gives the slightly under exposed areas a bit more pop (but this will show in the next step), however to balance this the blacks also need to be increased, otherwise the shadows become too soft and the image looks flat.

3) Slight contrast increase 0.1 (This removes the haze a lot of images, particularly biking ones have, maybe it hides the dust in the air, I don't know), a very slight decrease in brightness, this moves the histogram to the left and gives us a little more room to play with the saturation. I increased the saturation to 0.2, which is fairly high (IMO) but it makes the red in the dirt and the green in the trees stand out more.

The last thing I didnt do, is fix the blown out sky and dust, it may be possible in the original raw, if it wasnt blown out too badly, on the jpg it has been compressed and lost though. To deal with this, use a parametric mask and select for very high luminosity only, you may need to combine it with a drawn mask to avoid where it has blown out in the dust (with you can fix in the same way using a brown/red). Preferably do a color correction toward a colder blue for the sky, alternatively simply pick a blue you want the sky to be and apply it to the mask, the same thing for the dust, then increase the blending until it looks natural.

I dont know what other lenses you have, so if your EF24-105F4 is your only option dont worry about this comment; 6400 is a very high ISO, although the image appears to have stood up to it quite well, if you have the option of a faster lens, try shooting at F2 and see how you like it, it will reduce the iso noise, and/or let you have a slightly faster shutter to freeze the dust movement a bit better. it will also reduce the depth of field, with may or may not be desirable for a given shot. Also try shooting from a bit further away, maybe go out to 50 or 75mm and see how you like it (if you dont already), this reduces the field of view and hence the different light conditions in the frame, which may sometimes be advantageous.

As a final comment, with races we have no choice what they ware, but if you have the choice, get them to ware bright colors, it makes the rider stand out a lot more. At least your races dont have glossy numbers on the front of their bikes, those things are horrible.
flag ntd14
Posted: Feb 21, 2017 at 15:10 Quote
Here is an image I really like in some respects, originally I down graded it because of the obvious exposure issues. There was a gap in the canopy where the light picked up the lip of the jump, but was on an angle such that the rider needed to be in the air before they were exposed by the light. This provided an interesting challenge (which I obviously failed) but in light of the question above, over the next couple days I am going to make an attempt at fixing the image, particularly the blown out areas in post and try to document it, so we can have a discussion regarding techniques to fix these issues as they seams to appear quite a bit in this thread.

Blakes seeding run on the GC Christchurch adventure park

First attempt after about an hour in Darktable and Gimp. Not great, but still better than the original:

Attempt 1 at correcting a very over exposed image in darktable and gimp

Does anyone have thoughts on how to tidy it up further?
flag guancho-libre
Posted: Mar 3, 2017 at 12:52 Quote
ntd14 wrote:
Attempt 1 at correcting a very over exposed image in darktable and gimp

Does anyone have thoughts on how to tidy it up further?
Email me the RAW file lol
But really I would be more than happy to try and clean it up a bit for you.
flag guancho-libre
Posted: Mar 3, 2017 at 12:59 Quote
Here are a two from this spring, It's been staying around 5' c here so we have been hitting the streets non stop just exploring.


Darcy doing a tuck no hander from the ledge over the sidewalk into the street. I was experimenting with a cheap CPL filter and it left a wicked orange tint and complete lack of contrast so it took a bit of work to bring it back but it let me have a bit of extra fun with the editing on that set.

Tuck over the sidewalk gap


Shawn doing a double tire ride on the skinny top of a garbage couch we found on the way to the skatepark. The people that had thrown this couch us where drinking in their backyard and where getting a good laugh out of us riding their garbage for about 45 minutes

Tires on garbage couch
flag Robindarius
Posted: Nov 6, 2017 at 21:14 Quote
A quick shoot in the woods withe the local crew. It's bee a while since I managed to get some shots of these guys. any feedback will be great.
flag RileyMcLay
Posted: Nov 22, 2017 at 20:38 Quote
old mate Jacob up Skyline Queenstown, what you guys recon?
12 pack chicken nugget
flag geuben
Posted: Dec 10, 2017 at 17:50 Quote
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I don't often take photos of me riding and this is one I took recently that I like. Taken in Te Anau NZ, had to move very fast as the sunset didn't last long before ducking behind that mountain. Setup the tripod and camera and got my girlfriend to press the trigger remotely from my phone in burst mode.

What do you think?

I know there are a couple of issues with it, mainly:

1) I should have cranked the shutter a little faster, I was travelling a little too fast and am I tiny bit blurry (really hard to see on the camera screen when you're in a rush)
2) I can't jump to save my life!
flag editor
Posted: Dec 27, 2017 at 7:39 Quote
Hi guys, great shots here!
Here's one from me.

Rider: Me- Pavel Stefanov
Photo by Peter Savov

Getting some fresh air. Photo Peter Savovphotography nervous-hamster Photo of the week in www.mtb-bg.com Freeriding Marzocchilives
flag sg-mtb
Posted: Dec 28, 2017 at 11:46 Quote
That's really cool!
flag tada234
Posted: Jan 23, 2018 at 21:57 Quote
Yeh

Please critique this photo
flag sg-mtb
Posted: Jan 27, 2018 at 18:16 Quote
tada234 wrote:
Yeh

Please critique this photo
Looks really good. I might've decided to shoot on a bit of an angle so there wouldn't be so much of a cluster between the rider's limbs and the bars of the bike. ...BUT that wouldn't of given us the nice leading line of the jump. Good work on the creative side of things! On the technical aspect, the sky is a bit blown-out, but I need to search a bit in order to see that. Most people wouldn't notice it. One thing I would've done, however, is spot remove the top of the bushes when they intersect with the sky. There's very little distinction there between the thin lines of the plant and the sky. That would've just cleaned things up a bit.
Really nicely done, man!
flag Brasher
Posted: Oct 22, 2018 at 20:59 Quote
This used to be my Job (photography) but magazines all but died thanks to the internet and social media. I've moved industries. Was good to pick up the old Canon again and take some snaps of my new DH rig.

C&C welcome.

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