MTB Photography Tips: Part 4
Readers pictures.
In this edition we will first take a look at a couple of reader’s
images taken from our
MBWales Flickr Group, the two images I have chosen demonstrate a good understanding of some
of the rudimentary rules of photography.
This first image was shot
by Meirion on a ride over the Clwyd’s. I like this image for a couple of reasons, firstly the rule
of thirds applies very well, although two riders appear in the picture the
first ride is the main point of focus, looking at the image I find my eye drawn
into the picture following the curve of the trail, like all photographs it was
taken to capture a singular moment in time, to record an event and serve to
document, Merion has achieved this perfectly and produced a lovely Mountain Bike
Photo, well done.
This second image was taken
by Dan Jones in Aberystwyth. Dan has a really good understanding of composition, he has
worked very cleverly here with both the rule of thirds and image depth, using
the trees of the wood to his advantage he has framed the two riders perfectly,
although the trees are strongly in the foreground they absolutely do not
distract from the main point of focus, the image draws you in and creates a
illusion of speed. I love this, nice work! 10 out of 10.
Image Processing
So far we have covered a few of the basic elements to
photography, rule of thirds, composition and camera panning, so now I think it’s
time we looked at image processing, to process your images you will require
some software, some of you may have Adobe Photoshop, Elements, or a version of
CS and some of you may have Lightroom, for those of you that are really new to
photography and are working to a budget you can download Google’s Picasa, its
free and offers a couple of basic tools that are really going to help you get
the best from your images.
When you open up Picasa you will need to click on library
and then you will see the tool bar we are going to use, to start with we are
going to use just the first two tabs, and the first has a little spanner as its
icon and the second a little half shaded sun. The first tool selection has the
crop function; you may not always get the picture you want when you click the
shutter so using the crop tool you can select the areas you wish to include and
exclude from in the finished picture.
In the image below I have selected a picture that has quite
a poor composition, however, simply by cropping the image we can turn it into
an image that is really quite usable.
All the above editing was carried out in Picasa, as you can
see the image on the left is too dark, lacking in punch and has far too much
sky in it, by cropping the image and making changes to the exposure I have
managed to bring life to a seemingly average picture. The Image features, CampbellCoaching.eu and myself, PeterStevensPhotography.com
Next time I will show you exactly what I did to this image
and how you can do the same.
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