Bmx Riding

[Galningen]

first post on here! and for an introduction i'll post a photo i shot last tuesday.

its of my friend, Tomas, simply jumping over the funbox in the skatepark. i think it turned out good, but some critique would be appreciated. i need all the help i can get. hehe.

im not english-speaking, so please excuse me for my english..

[mtbbrian]

First off, Welcome to PR.com!
I think this is good photoraph.
It seems a little dark, but I know that is to be expected in places like this.
It's focus is good.
I like the fact that you can see some of the riders face.
I look forward to seeing more from you.
Brian

[brookied]

Good photo, very good detail. Do you have any more to look at

[gahspidy]

Welcome to the forum, and congrats on the featured photo. I think you've done well with this one, but the thing that bothers me here is the background and everything else is taking much of my attention away from the rider. If this was shot outside with sky nehind him and rocks and dirt in the foreground i would say the framing would be great. But for shooting in this area it seems that a slightly different point of view is needed to keep the rider from blending into the ceiling and the bg signs etc.
I think this is very good, but only that you were limited by the surroundings.

[Galningen]

Welcome to the forum, and congrats on the featured photo. I think you've done well with this one, but the thing that bothers me here is the background and everything else is taking much of my attention away from the rider. If this was shot outside with sky nehind him and rocks and dirt in the foreground i would say the framing would be great. But for shooting in this area it seems that a slightly different point of view is needed to keep the rider from blending into the ceiling and the bg signs etc.
I think this is very good, but only that you were limited by the surroundings.

yeah, i agree. if it was up to me i would remove the banners. too much color there. i mainly take bmx photos so you can expect more of them.
thanks for the comments and for the featured photo!

[Photo-John]

Welcome to the site! I shoot a lot of bike photos so I have a lot of tricks and ideas. The main thing is to make sure that the rider stands out as the main subject. He's sort of lost in this photo and it's way too busy for my taste. The rider sort of disappears into the clutter of the ceiling, back wall, and grafitti. The angle is interesting, but there's so much of the box that my eye gets stuck at the bottom of the image and I lose track of the rider.

The main issue for me is the clutter. I see two possible solutions, both of which would help make the rider stand out from the background. one is to light the rider brighter than the background. The background isn't that interesting. So using a flash on the rider and letting the background go a stop or more darker than the rider would separate your subject and minimize the background. Ideally, we'd have a suggestion of the grafitti and not much more.

The other thing would be to use a much slower shutter speed and pan, to introduce some blur. Good panning will keep your rider relatively sharp and blur the background, making it compete less for the viewer's attention. I'd actually combine all of the above - panning, using a flash, and letting the background go dark.

Hope my criticism is useful to you. And I hope you'll keep posting. It's good to see more bike photos here. We can always use another bike photographer :-)

Have you checked out the sports forum? It's a good place to ask sports technique questions.

[Galningen]

thanks alot photo-john! all of that helped a lot. good tips there and i will take them into consideration next time.

i didn't know there was a sport forum here. hehe.

[McMadCow]

While I do agree with some of the technical critiques that have been mentioned, I just wanted to chime in that I like this photo a lot. It captures the action well, and your framing really emphasizes his height (because I'm assuming he's not quite as high as this appears).
Nice work! It looks like a shot I'd see in Ride.

[chaostheorum]

hi new to this board, thought i would post some images to get aquainted.
ric

[mtbbrian]

Welcome chaostheorum,
I am glad you are apart of our community.
You'd be better off posting your own thread and posting as few of photographs per thread as possible.
You have some good stuff here!
I look forward to seeing more from you.
Make sure you check out all of the other forums as well.
Brian