A post for my shutterbug friends

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538609143839648236.post-64985139408384136062007-07-29T19:33:00.000-07:002007-08-13T23:46:01.656-07:002007-08-13T23:46:01.656-07:00A post for my shutterbug friends<a href="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1152/942194306_eaeb283a64_o.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1152/942194306_eaeb283a64_o.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a> As I’ve said before, I learn a lot each time I go somewhere and shoot pictures for an extended period, and last weekend’s MotoGP event was no different. I’m still going through the thousands of photos I took over the three days and so far have pruned the selection down to about 800 images in Lightroom. I thought I would share what I learned this time in case it helps any of you. Some pertains specifically to shooting racing, but I think the most important bits apply to the general situation of going someplace to shoot all day. Here is what I’ll try to do next time: Think more carefully about composition. I took lots of pictures where, even when I got a sharp focus, the composition was boring or there was nothing I could do with cropping to make in interesting photo out of the original. Either there was a distracting background, or the riders were doing nothing interesting at that moment, or the colors of the bike and rider bled into the background colors, etc etc. Getting the picture in focus is the technical part—getting that done in a situation where the camera is looking at an interesting angle with a suitable background is something else. Think more carefully about light. I remember reading that Ansel Adams put enormous effort into being at a certain spot on a certain time of a certain day so that the position of the sun would put shadows right where he wanted them for an exposure. I did the opposite at Laguna Seca. I was so preoccupied with finding a clear shot of the track that when I discovered a section of fence I could see over I shot there regardless of what the light was like. So I have loads of nice clear shots of bikes in darkness because the sun was behind them. I hope the process of deleting hundreds of dark pictures that might otherwise have been keepers will help me remember this in the future. And I don’t mean simply to make sure the light isn’t behind my subject, because a few of those shots look kinda cool—I just mean to make sure I’m seeing what I’m after before I spend 45 minutes in a given spot. The reason I was able to get a good view was likely because the better photographers were somewhere else where the light was better! Constantly reconsider my settings to make sure they fit the situation. For example, I tend to open the aperture way too much and leave it like that. I’m so fond of pictures with blurred backgrounds that makes the subjects pop out of the image that I tend to open the lens up all the way or nearly so. This makes getting the entire bike in focus very difficult sometimes. Even when I’m pre-focusing on a part of the track and waiting for the bike to ride into that zone before taking five or six quick exposures, I often make the area of focus so shallow that I miss the shot. Then I leave the lens set like that when I move to a new location and am trying for a different type of picture. I just deleted a lot of pictures where I wanted a much deeper area in focus, but I shot them all at f/5.6 so I didn’t get one with the look I wanted. Remember that a long lens is not truly a substitute for track access. Even with the 300m f/2.8 with a 2x converter, it was getting my camera close to the subject that made a difference. The long lens helped and was better than not having it, but getting the camera close is better than trying to compensate with focal length. Does this mean I’ll try to sneak inside the fence more? Maybe. But I’ll try to keep in mind that comparing my pictures to those of a pro with complete track access isn’t exactly fair. Bring a laptop!I learn more reviewing my photos than I do while shooting them because it is impossible to judge accurately if a photo is focused properly or not on the 2.5 inch screen my camera has. To improve more quickly, I need to bring a laptop with me and at the very least review the day’s pics each night, so that the next day I can go back with whatever I learned from that review. A laptop would also solve a problem I barely escaped from this time. On the Italian trip, I didn’t fill up my 12 gigs of memory cards in ten days. But at the track, I can fill them all up ini a single day because I’m shooting so many 5 or 6 shot sequences as the bikes pass. If my friend Dave hadn’t brought his Archos portable DVR with him and let me dump my pics each night to that 80 gig hdd, I would’ve been in bad shape. So in the future I will try harder to bring a laptop for proofing and clearing memory cards each night. The next scheduled photo day at the races in August 18, at the Historics at Laguna Seca. I guess I need to get my laptop’s hdd fixed!Scott Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03218777237735298176noreply@blogger.com3