BMXers making the best of Sandy Aftermath

[FireStorm]

I live at the Jersey shore, and we got rocked pretty hard by Super Storm Sandy. As I'm sure you've seen in other pictures, our boardwalks were just absolutely destroyed. The local skaters and BMXers turned the disaster into their own urban skate park, using concrete, piping and benches that were destroyed in the storm. Now they have a nice beach front park, for at the least the time being. I went out there today to take some shots. I'm not very strong in post, so I only touched up 2 of these, and Im not sure how I like it. Any ideas or suggestions on how to make them better in post, please let me know! and as always, C&C are always encouraged and appreciated, thanks!

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7

8

9

10

 

[412 Burgh]

most of them look soft and have very flat lighting.

 

[FireStorm]

Is there anyway I can improve that using just natural light, though?

 

[o hey tyler]

Is there anyway I can improve that using just natural light, though?

What it looks like happened in a lot of these was that the focus locked on the background and not the rider. What I would suggest is prefocusing on where they're going to be in the frame when you actuate the shutter. The four or so that I looked at are very clearly out of focus. You can see that the background is much sharper than the subject. You may also want to stop your lens down a bit more from wide open at f/5.6 fully extended to 50-55mm. Go to f/8 or 7.1 at least to improve upon the overall sharpness.

If you had access to an off camera speedlight, that would substantially brighten up the rider with long hair and dark pants who appears to be a fuzzy dark mass in some of them. You can try using the pop up flash for a bit of fill, but its weak power will only do so much.

 

[FireStorm]

thanks! that's really helpful.

 

[gregtallica]

1 and 8 are the most interesting. Funny considering they're pretty close to the same look. You should try cropping out the skateboarder in #1, I think that he pulls away from the focus of the biker.

Cool though

 

[FireStorm]

those are my 2 favorite, too, which is why i tried editing them, haha... I cropped #1 at first, but i didn't find it as interesting for some reason. Thanks for your input!

 

[Brycycle53]

most of these the rider is smack i the center, shoot from a lower angle, generally makes it more interesting. Timeing is off in nearly all of these, you missed the trick moment of the trick. with out using flash, you could expose more for the rider, it would blow out the sky but subject would look more properly exposed.

 

[FireStorm]

thanks for the tips! I'll try lower angles next time and play around with my exposure

 

[Brycycle53]

Keep it up man, There is an article in one of my bmx magazines about the Riders and the Sandy aftermath, some of the photos are really amazing.