Hi, Experts. I went out to the local motorbike track on the weekend to take photos of the bikes. Here is a picture from the professional guy out there, and one from me. How come his are so vibrant and sharp?
Assuming the second photo is from the professional. There are many possible reasons that his/her photos are better but probably the main one is that he/she is a professional and knows how to get the best shot in every situation. Other reasons could be better lens, better processing e.g. raw vs jpg, faster shutter speed, more precise focusing, a diagonally moving subject is easier to focus on than one that is coming directly towards you. Keep trying, you will get better.
Yeah I would say he probably shot stopped down an extra stop and from the side, may have cropped the fall off forward or been zoomed in a bit but that whole side of the hill is in the range of in focus for the DOF he was working with. Shooting head on like you did as Ray mentioned worked against you. Otherwise it was pushed in post processing to have a lot of saturation and is sharpened in post as well. In short, a bit of experience and more post processing are the key differences in results.
I literally don"t understand what you said in that whole first sentence. LOL Except for the zoomed in bit, I understand that. He had access to the track, whereas I didn't, so he was always going to get better shots in that regard. Maybe I should have asked you guys, how could I have made this a clear, sharper picture.
Stopping down - using smaller aperture (bigger number) will give more in focus in your shot. - Good for landscape **Note** The opposite makes more of the image blurry other than whats in focus. - Good for Portraits Fall off would be the out of focus part, he may have cropped out the blurry foreground so you only see the dirt that is sharp on the hill. But just as likely it was shot cropped that way using his feet and the lens. DOF - Depth of field - this is what is in focus when you take an image. There is math here, but basically depending distance to subject, lens MM, and the aperture you will get a range of what can be in focus. This can be anywhere from inches to 100s of feet. Remember the examples above... - Portrait at 85mm, only few feet away, using f2.8 you have inches of depth of field, so anything behind or in front of the person has a soft bokeh. - The landscape example, f16 on a 24mm lens shot half a mile away, everything is in focus. These are extreme examples but should give you an idea. You can find calculators online to plug the setting in and give you what your working with. One other thing to know here is .. for example if they give you 9 inches of DOF in a calculator, that is 3 inches in front of the camera focus point and 6 inches behind is where the drop off is. It's a 1/3 to 2/3 ratio. Thanks for attending my photography class
As the guy said about the sharpness, increasing the aperture esp for sports so you hit your target with a wider depth of field also use servo mode rather than one shot so the camera carries on focusing right up until you press the shutter all the way. one shot will gain the correct focus then hold there and not carry on refocusing so you could be out of focus very quick on a moving subject, if you can supply the camera settings and exposure settings for the image you took that would help too as you might be too slow with the shutter speed etc there is a big clue to sharpness in the motorbike tire tread in your image and his, in yours its a blur but in his the tire tread is more visible, this is because the shutter speed is most likely alot faster thus freezing the action, probably somewhere in the 1/2000 - 1/4000 you can experiment with that trying to see if you can stop motion using the shutter speed, but try not to let the iso go too high as that will grain the image and you might loose sharpness there too as for the punchy, there is nothing wrong with your image there just needs a bit of vibrancy and saturation to bring it up to punchy colours, which in sports is a good thing, if you are a jpeg only shooter you can still edit the images just that raw contains 4 times as much data for the best of the best. in jpeg shooting using the correct white balance helps to get the image off to a good start, auto white balance is generally ok but there are times like in sports you might want to boost the colours abit in camera, changing it to a preset white balance or dialing it up in kelvin will do that i have done a quick edit on your image with vibrancy, if you don't want me to post it i wont, best to ask first. btw, great imge of the low five hand slap!! i'd say thats the better image there, has a story to it
Welcome to the forum, Michelle, from down in Tassy. I am only guessing here but did you use auto and if so the camera picks a middle of the range setting, there is nothing more I can add that Ray-UK, Johnsey and Caladina has written but to add that it may have been taken in Manual and 1/3 to 2/3 of a stop of light was added, if you look at your light meter on your camera, there is the section known as mid-tones and this goes from -1 to +1 and going in to the +1/3 to +2/3 of that range will make the mid-tone colours a bit brighter.
You Guys are really awesome with your knowledge and responses. Thank you so much. I may have bitten off more than I can chew with photography, but I have wanted to do it for so long now, I am going to give it my all. I bought my first camera and lens kit about ten years ago, and it's taken me this long to move past that. I have dyscalculia, with is the maths version of dyslexia. It also affects how I respond and manage any verbal and written instructions. It's a challenge, but I'm nothing if not tenacious. I will take onboard everything you have alls o kindly told me, and apply bits of it next time I go out to the track. Thankyou all again.
Michelle, not everyone has it easy when it comes to photography, I have two ladies with vision problems in my Community based photography class I teach, both need a carer to get around but enjoy this pass-time and with patience and persistence they do quite well, one has been coming to my class for 6 years now. one has a thing for pictures of her shoes.
Hello Michelle, I'll be the non expert. My two cents worth is start with photographing a part of the track where the bikes are not moving that fast, which it looks as if you are at the moment. We can work on getting images that you are happy with, and then move onto more challenging shots. What are your auto focus settings, what is your ISO settings, shutter speed, and aperture. Also, what gear are you using? Camera and lens. Most of all, don't feel disheartened. There will be some form of learning curve. Gary
There may be a bit off an initial shock and learning curve when you take the camera off auto and try to control the situation for better results. But honestly once you get the handful of basics you should be off and running. There are plenty of good ways to learn. There are always instructional videos online. However, I would suggest taking the user manual and reading a section a night to digest slower what all the settings do if you didn't get that far. Once you have the terms and some basics down it shouldn't be too bad. You also don't need to be good at math and calculate DOF, you just need a general idea whats going on, and how it increase or decease it depending on the situation. Some people geek out on the technical side others shoot all by feel. There is podcast I have recommended to beginners to go back and listen to the first few dozen episodes made by a few Canadians. The reason for this is guy who starts the podcast walks his friend through a purchase of a new rebel so he can learn how to use it (circa 2010). So they have an episode on each topic, ISO, shutter, white balance, then onto some more advanced topics like dragging the shutter and flash. Its a good way to get bite size episodes on a specific topic just like an intro to photo class would do. I tune in for the banter between them that has continued for all these years. Check out the episode list here: http://twohosers.com/episodes/ I guess its the only first ~375 listed there, but they are on Itunes otherwise.
