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Parisian Street Scene
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Should this be in Street, Sport, Travel, People or (perhaps) Fashion?
Anyway, after my zero votes polling in the compo, I’d like some feedback. Please edit the photo if you like. Maybe some clever Photoshopper can bring out the Eiffel Tower that you can just see reflected in the window?
There are lots of things I like about this photo, but on the other hand there are also lots of things I don’t.. making it an all round average shot for me.
What I really like:
* Perfect timing, you caught the person at the peak of the jump with a HUGE amount of air. Timing is spot on.
* Shot is reasonably sharp, you did pretty well with the focus
* Colour and exposure are also pretty good on what looks to have been a very sunny dayWhat I don’t like
* I’ll probably sound like a broken record, but shooting from eye level perspective seldom works and it doesn’t work here either. I’d have loved to have seen this shot from much lower (even lying on your stomach) looking up. It would have made for so much more drama.
* The shot is too busy. A wider aperture would have really helped separate the subject from the background. As it is now, he competes with a lot of other detail in the shot
* I know it’s difficult to frame shots like this, but the composition is weak, with him being too tight to the left of the frame and too much wasted space on the right. A crop and some clever photoshopping could give him more room on the left.
* I’m not convinced about the angles/offset horizon. There are too many lines, which should be vertical/horizontal, which just aren’t. I think you could get away with this if there were less things screaming out to be straighened.All taken on board, thanks Ciaran. It’s a lot more difficult taking this type of shot than I expected. When you’re doing landscapes the quickest thing that happens is the sunset (and you can still miss that if you’re not careful).
This shot was taken at 28mm because I found that zooming in made it very hard to capture the subject. I was at f5.6, so I may have been able to open the aperture another stop. I like the idea about lying down – I’d have been too shy to do it in front of 200 odd people, but I acknowledge the wisdom of doing it!
As for framing the shot: these guys were going at about 30 miles per hour (48km/h) and I took about 50 shots before I got one at the height of his leap! I started to get the hang of it, though, and next time I’ll be more adept. Practise Practise Practise.
I have limited experience shooting this kind stuff, but the times I have tried it, I do sympathise with the problems you encountered.
Here’s a shot of mine from a year ago (not a prime example by any means), but it shows some of the things I did:
1. Rather than zooming in and out, I decided on a fixed focal length (around 60mm) and just kept it there, waiting for the skater(s) to come into the frame. It took a few goes before I managed to capture a shot where I was happy with the framing.
2. I had a pretty slow lens and that coupled with the fact I was shooting at a reasonably wide focal length, meant I knew the background wouldn’t be thrown out completely. As such, I tried to frame it in such a way as to minimise as many distractions as possible. In the end, the lines in the background actually added to the shot (IMO), but this was more noticed after the fact than it being deliberate.
3. I opted to look reasonably silly, but not stupid, so rather than lying on my stomach I got down on my knees and shot. Being honest, I rarely care what people think about me when I’m shooting. I’d rather be ridiculed at the time and walk away with a shot than to just fit in, but capture nothing.
4. It’s definitely worth noting that these guys weren’t going close to the same speed or jumping the same height, but the principals should be very similar.That’s a nice photo. Everything you say makes sense, too.
One of the anomalies about your pic and mine is the lack of movement that results from the fast shutter speed. Taking your shot as an example, the boy is very dynamic looking from the knees up, but his feet and the board are almost surreal, like one of those welded statues. In most of my shots I had a similar feeling. I can’t think of a perfect answer to this except for panning the camera and reducing the shutter speed. I doubt I’d have even got down to 1/500s in Paris and this is still too fast to show movement.
I think for these shots, it’s probably more of the norm to use a faster shutter speed and freeze motion. I tried panning for the first time recently at the Phoenix park races.. I’d hate to have tried it here :shock: For me, your original shot/idea/plan is the best.. try and time the shot to capture them at their peak and use a fast shutter speed to freeze it. You do lose a little bit of the sense of motion, but I think that’s balanced with the drama.
There’s nearly always a brilliant photo here
http://www.racingpost.co.uk/news/splash.sd
I don’t know if they have an archive of old photos, but some of the once I’ve seen on the splash page have been awesome.
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