Photo Critique Thread

[Matblack]

Have you taken a shot you are really pleased with and want so input on it. Or you feel a shot should have been better given the thought you put into it and the equipment, or do you just want to get the best out of you compact? You can post pics here for constructive input or just a pat on the back. We have a number of experienced photographers here who I am sure will be happy to share some knowledge :)

If this takes off I will make it a sticky, although if you have a technique you want to share or want some more indepth advice feel free to make a seperate thread :)

MB

[Matblack]

First up then

http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/1438/dscf1281cx0.jpg

The A1GP was the first time I had tried to use a tracking technique to get a shart picture of a moving object.

To do this first I used the two stage shutter to fix focus on a point opposite me on the track.

I then moved the camera to the left so I could track on comming cars I used the viewfinder to get the car in the centre of the frame and followed it, attempting to keep it dead centre.

When the car reached the track position where I had fixed the focus I gently depressed the shutter to the second stage and took the photo.

The result seems good to me, the car is in the centre of the frame and in focus whilst the backgroud is blured giving a sense of movement.

If I tried this again I think I would probably use the manual focus option to fix the focus completely rather than having to hold the shutter half depressed.

I used the auto stettings on the camera rather than the sport setting as this gave a longer exposure and hence more of an implication of speed.

I took a couple of hundred shoots on the day and this was about the best.

Here are a few more

http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/8796/dscf1398rq8.jpg

In the following shot I used shutter priority to increase the exposure to see if I could get even more of a speed effect, it seems to work but its harder to keep the car in centre frame and hence in focus.

http://img409.imageshack.us/img409/5038/dscf1452vd9.jpg

This final shot I was very pleased with at the time, but unfortunately the light wasn't right and a lot of detail was lost which is a shame, the day was very overcast in the morning and was behind the subject which is obviously a critical error :(. However I haven't croped this and I'm really pleased with the composition :)

http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/7331/dscf1176pz5.jpg

Any advice gratefully excepted :)

MB

[Dr. Z]

:)

Not bad at all for a first go of panning shots - notoriously hard to get "right". In my opinion, the shot of the Ginetta is the best because the background is so much more blurred than the others!

In my experience, getting the background blurred is the absolutely fundamental part. To do this, my approach was to get into shutter priority and just keep going down the shutter speeds until the wheels were acceptably blurred. I found this to give me the best balance between a sense of motion, background blur and difficulty of obtaining the shot.

I havnt been to enough trackdays to really master this technique properly, so I can only give you advice from what I have learned so far :)