All great captures! The first one looks just a touch over exposed, which is probably thanks to the meter being throw by the dark area in the trees behind the skater. If you shot RAW, it'd be easy to turn it down just a little.
The last one suffers from being on the wrong side of the light (but right side for the trick), so most of his skin is blown out, but recovering that may make the shadow detail drop away. If you shot RAW, a pseudo-HDR would probably fix that.
I did shoot all raw. how do you do the HDR that your talking about? Plus I shot this at the wrong time of the day. the sun was at my back and it was about 7pm. had to try out the new gear right.lol
D700
85mm 1.8 D
24-70 2.8 ED
70-200 2.8 ED VRII
2xSB900
Elinchrom Ranger RX 1100watt heads.
I like all the pics. They have some good action. These guys are crazy for doing this, but 25 years ago (ok maybe 30 years ago), it would have seemed like fun.... Man I am old..
Ha, I know what ya mean about new gear - who cares a/b the light, just get out and shoot! I like the edited version better as well - it brought up the dark areas very nicely. To me the skin still looks a little too hot, but it would probably take more editing than it's worth to fix that.
BTW, if you want a free HDR program that doesn't watermark, try http://www.easyhdr.com/download.php Not the fanciest software in the world, but it works pretty well... for free.