boats - fast boats

[jetrim]

If Grandpaw can step outside his comfort zone, so can I :lol:. Shot this past weekend, wondering if the frozen blades kill these shots, or if anyone has any ideas on PP blur techniques that don't look cheesy. (tried motion blur, radial blur, vanishing point so far - and not happy with the results)

[draymorton]

The first is awesome, really. Don't even bother trying to blur the blades.

Nothing to do with the images themselves, but you might consider urgrading your watermark.

EDIT: There's a sharp, blue waterline running long the bottom of the leftmost boat that shows evidence of oversharpening... some weird CA and a halo or something around it. Understand that I'm really nitpicking here, both because I know how accomplished you are and because I like this image so much. I'm basically looking at it as though it were mine.

[gahspidy]

Yeah, first one is sweet. I agree about the combo of CA and oversharpening going on perhaps by the line on the waters crest under boat and a small bit of it on horizon line.
Blades blurred wuld have been better, but not a killer as it is. Too much work would have to go into getting a realistic blur from those blades in this perspective and not worth the effort really as the image is excellent as is.
Good action, Jim.

[SmartWombat]

The shutter speed on the last one I see, with the two boats, is better.
It's going to be hard to get a good slow pan and keep the boats sharp, because unlike cars on a track they're bouncing on the waves so there's going to be vertical blur even if your pan is spot on.

They look over-processed to me though, with haloes around the rotor blades.
I don't think its chromatic aberration, though it's worth looking at the originals to see if they need correcting.
I've found if I don't get it right in camera, there's little I can do to make it convincing in post processing. But I know Gary can work miracles, I've seen it.

One thing to watch out for is the sharpening and resizing process to make the images forum sized.
I learned here that if you're resizing by hand, it's best to resize in smaller steps and occasionally sharpen as you do so. Once I got Lightroom (instead of Thumbs+) my problems went away, as their software does that job better.
But for Thumbs+ I had about a 10 step macro to resize down 10% a few times, unsharp mask, resize a few times, unsharp mask again, resize a couple more times, size to 800 longest side, then a final light sharpening.

[hminx]

Don't be in too much hurry to blur the blades as I think most shots of heli's with a two blade rotor are like this , the tail rotor is nicely blurred . The first shot looks the best of the three I think.

[jetrim]

There's a sharp, blue waterline running long the bottom of the leftmost boat that shows evidence of oversharpening... some weird CA and a halo or something around it.

Yeah, first one is sweet. I agree about the combo of CA and oversharpening going on perhaps by the line on the waters crest under boat and a small bit of it on horizon line.

Yep, this was shot with my cheapest nastiest 70-300 G lens ($49 used at a swap meet). A buddy of mine drug his 300mm 2.8 "E" lens along, and his shots don't show it. Call me paranoid, but taking a $3000.00 lens into a crowd of drunken rednecks at the beach just didn't seem like such a good idea :idea: especially since the day ended with a 6 block mad dash to the truck through a driving thunderstorm.

The shutter speed on the last one I see, with the two boats, is better.
It's going to be hard to get a good slow pan and keep the boats sharp, because unlike cars on a track they're bouncing on the waves so there's going to be vertical blur even if your pan is spot on.

Yep, have 200+ shots in my recycle bin to prove that hypothesis The shot with the two boats was @ 1/500 sec and the others were @ 1/750 if I recall correctly.

They look over-processed to me though, with haloes around the rotor blades.

Went a bit overboard with the high pass, especially on the vertical shot. It was late, I just botched the sharpening. Not a big deal to reprocess and clean up the CA from the cheap glass.

Thanks for the feedback everyone!