Alan Kiecker, QPSA
June 2022 - : “Skater”
About the Image(s)
Description:
My camera club has an agreement with the city to take photos of their events in turn they provide us with a meeting room. A recent shoot was the ice show put on by students in their skate school. I chose this particular photo to share with you because the skater looks like she is having so much fun, a really good time.
I found this shoot to be rather challenging. The arena is dark, lighting provided only by spotlights on the skaters, i.e. the lighting is constantly changing. Combine this with the need of a fast shutter speed to stop the action of the skaters, I decided that I would set the lens wide open (hoping that I would have sufficient DOF) and use auto-ISO. In order to capture the photos that I wanted, I shot in continuous mode and focus to follow the action. On my first pass through the images I eliminated the blurry ones and the ones that did not have the skater’s face toward the camera “ about half of the 3000 photos that I took. With subsequent passes through the images I finally gave the city about 100 images to use for next year’s publicity. All images were run through Topaz DeNoiseAI then processed with Lightroom Classic. ISO ranged from 560 to 6400.
Technical Info: Nikon Z7ii, Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 lens at 200mm with FTZ-2 adapter, 1/500 sec at f/2.8, ISO 900.
== al
5 comments posted
I chose to let art assist nature:
1. I used the new "select Subject" feature in Photoshop. the inverted the selection so I was working on the background.
2. I used Curves to apply a basket curve pinning the 25% and 75% points so it only applied to the midtones.
3. I re-inverted the image and used a soft edge brush to select the lower half of the image up to the skater's outstretched arms. The I "re-re-inverted" the image so that the top half of the background was selected.
5. In blur gallery, I added an 8 px field blur to simulate focus blur. I then did an overall lightening of the selection in Saturation/Lightness.
Although this sounds complex, the actual correction took 4 minutes to perform.
I hope you find this useful. Posted: 06/10/2022 13:48:30
As far as exposure goes, I like where you have it. She feels bright and clear, but not overly so and you have kind of a built-in gradient fading from bright (but not overly so) to dark in the background - thanks for sharing!
Posted: 06/12/2022 19:45:29
Like you I have tried to take pictures in an ice rink. The lighting is tough, since it is usually tungsten. You did a great job in taking care of that part of the problem. I think I would have shot it at a more narrow DOF, like f8. Her face is slightly out of focus and her back skate is definitely not sharp. You might also go with say 1000 sec. to freeze the motion.
All that said, this is a great shot that should make her parents smile!! Posted: 06/23/2022 13:24:43