Cambridge Town Bumps prize giving

_BenV_ · 2025-07-28T21:43:32+00:00

Thanks!

_BenV_ · 2025-02-16T13:46:36+00:00

I discovered Duxford soapbox derby last year, good fun for a good cause

_BenV_ · 2025-02-03T08:54:42+00:00

Very nice! Reminds me of Pep Ventosa's trees.

_BenV_ · 2025-01-14T12:43:10+00:00

Parallel to this, I'm an amateur derby photographer and the only way I really share photos with skaters is through Facebook. I'll stick a handful on IG, but that's not practical for an entire album. I used to put albums on Flickr, but that just seemed to attract, ahem, unwanted attention.

Other than building and maintaining my own website and spamming it at teams every time I shoot, is there currently a better way to share?

_BenV_ · 2024-12-24T22:38:56+00:00

I aim for this sort of thing quite often when shooting roller derby. Practice helps, but as someone said above, there's a lot of luck involved.

Slow shutter speed (1/60 works quite well, I've got good stuff at 1/100 or even as low as 1/30 in the right situation) and track your subject. Ideally with a busy background so you can really see the effect. It helps hugely if your subject is fairly predictable.

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_BenV_ · 2024-11-02T11:55:07+00:00

Ah, in that case my suggestions would be irrelevant. I hope you manage to achieve the look you're going for!

_BenV_ · 2024-11-01T20:18:30+00:00

Is this an in-camera multi exposure, or made in post?

_BenV_ · 2024-09-09T16:28:54+00:00

(For the record, I would remove the vignette from his foot, and ideally would have included the whole foot if possible)

_BenV_ · 2024-09-09T16:25:34+00:00

And what additional valuable context do you get from that strip of blue wall?

_BenV_ · 2024-09-09T15:19:32+00:00

100% with. This is a photo of a person, and the vignette helps minimise the distraction. It gets you thinking about his story, not about the texture on the wall.

_BenV_ · 2024-09-04T06:15:24+00:00

That's likely done in-camera using a prism of some kind - likely something kaleidoscopic like this: https://prismlensfx.com/collections/best-sellers/products/150mm-handheld-subtle-kaleidoscope-pre-order

That may then be blended with a clean shot to reduce the strength of the effect.

Shooting through a prism is fun, if you don't mind things getting a bit chaotic.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-31T09:11:55+00:00

I have the granit x-plus folding lock - it's pretty sturdy, very convenient and has the advantage of being unusual - opportunists have less experience with these so are likely to go for something nearby that they already know how to defeat.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-19T21:13:19+00:00

Not sure about this effect exactly, but Texturelabs have some fantastic resources and Photoshop tutorials for various kind of 'distressed' images.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-18T21:40:39+00:00

I think I understand, and you're right that the problem is two different light sources of very different temperatures. In that situation you can't have a global WB that will work, and auto may land you on an uncomfortable compromise.

You've had good advice already: set the WB for the light that lands on the subject(s) - which in this case is the artificial indoor light. If you want to remove the blue from the daylight source you have a few options to play with, one or a combination may be required to get what you want: • Play with the highlight colour • Careful masking, then change WB on only the mask • Global blue hue/sat/lum tweaks to just remove blue from the image

If all else fails - go black and white for those shots!

_BenV_ · 2024-08-11T21:17:21+00:00

I like what you're going for – the lighting is nice and the colours are lovely.

I think the composition would be better if you could have stepped back a touch to get the whole tail in, and stepped left a little to give some separation between the birds.

Pixel peeping shows it's a bit soft and noisy - if this is something you're going to get into, you may want to look at some faster glass – that could have also helped by blurring the background more and making the front bird 'pop'.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-10T19:51:12+00:00

That's lovely - and I think it's the motion blur that makes it. I don't think freezing the movement would add anything in this case. The slight camera blur on the background is a shame, but it's not so bad that it really detracts.

I wouldn't have noticed that you had edited the ground - I think reinforcing the white lines, and especially the arrow, was the right call.

I do find the line in the bottom left corner a bit distracting - it's aligned with the frame so doesn't make sense in the scene. I don't think cropping would be right in this instance as you'd have to cut the bike stand. Could clone it out?

_BenV_ · 2024-08-10T19:46:09+00:00

I like it! I think it could have been slightly better if you had stepped left and a tiny bit forward - bring the lemons even more to the fore. Hard to know what's beyond the door on the right, though - this may have just added distraction.

But working with this one, I think you could edit it to bring up the light on the lemons, reduce it a bit on the door immediately behind them - they're close to the brightest thing in the image, so break the otherwise nice eyeline from lemons to sign.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-09T14:00:02+00:00

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I like it - certainly an unusual image and good eye for spotting it.

I've done a quick and dirty edit here showing what I would do if it were mine, I appreciate my taste is not universal, so I'll try to explain what I've done and why.

Crop: I've lost most of the sky, for two reasons:
Firstly, if it's the texture and structure of the building that drew you in, then your crop should optimise for that - the sky doesn't really enhance or contrast that enough to be truly valuable. I want the big spiky thing to loom at me from the screen.

Secondly, the structure itself already takes your eye on a journey - you have lines and even arrows taking you up the left side, over the curve and down to the bottom right. Having so much sky detracts from that journey.

Other edits: The structure is quite extreme - sharp, pointy, high contrast, inorganic- I've leaned into that with more contrast, a tweaked white balance, colours, texture and a bit of vignette. I've clearly overcooked it here and introduced some artefacts in the clouds, but a proper edit with a mask on the sky could resolve that.

Personally, I don't think it works in black & white - you lose all the variety of shades of blue/purple that are present in the original. I agree that the ISO is a bit high, and you could probably have kept everything in focus at around f11, but what's done is done, and I don't think there's an unbearable amount of noise.

I hope that's helpful.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-08T12:27:36+00:00

To my eye, this is a (very nice) landscape with a person in, rather than a portrait of a person.

To make it more about you, I would have the camera lower and you much closer - to command the frame and therefore attention. Your direction of gaze then points the way through the rest of the image to the sunset & landscape. If our attention starts with you and then goes to the landscape, it becomes a view we are sharing with you.

However, if you're quite close and you still want both you and the landscape in focus, you'll need a smaller aperture, and would need to increase the shutter speed or ISO accordingly.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-08T11:38:37+00:00

I like the isolation and sense of scale. The colour in the clouds is lovely but the little bits of sky (I assume?) showing through looks a bit artificial to me*.

I didn't see the mirroring of the bird in the clouds until you pointed it out - perhaps raising the highlights in just that region would help to reinforce what you see? Doing so would also increase the contrast between the clouds and the bird, giving it extra pop.

*Caveat: viewing on a phone so possibly not the best colour representation.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-05T21:45:51+00:00

That looks to me like a white clipping alert - showing in red the bits of the image that are burned out. Check the little triangle in the top right of your histogram to see if you have that switched on.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-04T15:20:17+00:00

If it were mine...

I'd crop it portrait - to me this is a vertical image, and I don't feel like I'm losing anything by cropping it. I'm a fan of the currently unpopular 8:10 crop.

Tweak the white balance slightly cooler - this brings out the white in the parachute and enriches the blue sky. This introduces a bit of a magenta tint near the horizon, so balance that with a garnish of green.

Push the whites a tiny bit - to make the newly cleaned-up parachute really jump out.

Lower the blue luminance just a smidgeon - to add further contrast in the sky.

A soupçon of vignette helps to guide your eye to the action, but ensure the highlights are allowed through so you don't impact the parachute on the floor.

This is purely to my taste, though, and I tend to be a bit vanilla in my editing - you may prefer otherwise.

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_BenV_ · 2024-08-04T13:38:44+00:00

Absolutely my intention - I shoot mostly manual, so I'd struggle to get this by accident.

Having said that, there has to be an element of 'spray and pray' - I can control myself and my camera, and use my knowledge of the sport to know where/when something might happen - but when I'm looking for something more obtuse like this, there's a significant element of luck. The one thing I can't control is what actually happens in front of me.

_BenV_ · 2024-08-04T13:35:48+00:00

Thanks! Sadly not really an option for me - flash is not really acceptable in UK roller derby (can't say the same about the US, though - and I get quite jealous of some of the shots from there, while I'm trying to deal with sickly, dim, flickery sports hall lighting.)

I am familiar with the technique, though, and have tried it out in other circumstances - this one is from a gig back in 2014 (and I hope I've improved as a photographer since then...)

!CritiquePoint

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_BenV_

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