jumping horse

jcolman · May 11, 2008

Shot this yesterday for a friend of mine.

Overread · May 11, 2008

Really good action shot and the polarizer (I take it you used one to get a sky like that) has worked well in your favour. If I were to say it had faults I would say that that horse seems a little soft - rider seems better. With most action shots blurring can work well, but here I feel that a pinsharp shot would be better - you are freezing the moment of action.
I think using a slightly smaller apature might help out a shot like this.

ps - it might look sharper in fullsize and this this softness might just be the result of lowering the resolution of the shot and not using and unsharpen mask after - which is advised as you do lose sharpness in a shot when resizing

jcolman · May 11, 2008

Overread said:
Really good action shot and the polarizer (I take it you used one to get a sky like that) has worked well in your favour. If I were to say it had faults I would say that that horse seems a little soft - rider seems better. With most action shots blurring can work well, but here I feel that a pinsharp shot would be better - you are freezing the moment of action.
I think using a slightly smaller apature might help out a shot like this.

ps - it might look sharper in fullsize and this this softness might just be the result of lowering the resolution of the shot and not using and unsharpen mask after - which is advised as you do lose sharpness in a shot when resizing

Thanks. You're right, I did use a CP filter. Actually the horse is a bit sharper than the rider. I would have liked to shoot at a smaller aperture however I felt I was pushing the ISO too far as it was. This was shot at 1/6400 sec @ f/4. ISO 800. I tried a few other shots at slower shutter speeds but I wasn't happy with the results.

I did a little PS to remove a power line in the sky but I did not process the shot for sharpness at all. I probably will if I ever make a print from this.