2 shots from saturday.

I took this on this double that we made a few hours before this was taken. Its not a very interesting angle, but for some reason I really like the way it turned out. This was the only really good one I got, my friend wanted to try his hand at getting shots of me jumpin, so he shot most of the time. Tell me what you think of this shot, we built these a 3 mile ride from home, so I will be back tomorrow if my friends bike is fixed, so I can adjust some settings and retake it.

f5.6, 1/320, ISO 100

This one was taken right after the jump, in a nice berm thats bigger now. Dont have the picture on the camera anymore, so dont know the settings. I wish I had framed it so he wasnt leaving the frame, but I seem to do this with close up turn pictures all the time. I am going to reshoot the berm again with different angles and some panning shots.

TeePee-
What's nice about this is that you can see how he's finessing the bike in the air. It adds tension and makes me feel the jump. I also like how the area behind the rider is dark while he's light. That makes him pop out of the photo.

I don't remember what camera you're using. But one thing that would have made this one really, really good would be a longer lens and a really shallow depth-of-field. That would have made the background softer and made him really pop out of the image. And maybe a tighter crop. Right now there's a bit too much detail in the background competing with your main subject. A less obvious reason a lot of bike photographers use long, fast lenses is the ability to drop out the background with a shallow depth-of-field. I do it all the time.

I love that about your photos John, I try to get the depth effect, but I never can, I wish I could have gotten it here. How would I go about doing it? I took a short photo class (that came free with the purchase of my camera) and I know it said the more open your apeture is, the shallower the DOF, but even shooting wide open I cant get blurred backgrounds unless I am shooting very close to the subject (see my barbed wire shot I posted). I dont have a digital SLR, and dont have the cash to buy longer, faster lenses for the film one, so should I just shoot from further away and zoom more with my fz10? I really want to figure it out. Thanks for the compliments, what you said about the finesse and feel is exactly what I like about the shot, Brad, the rider has a cool style.