Vibrant skating

[picsfrommt]

I've been hanging out at the local roller derby team's practices to play with action photography. The team has two locations for practice, both with lousy light. Oh well, just adds to the challenge. To make things worse, one of the venues has hideous varnished pine walls. Okay, enough grousing for now.

I decreased the saturation a lot and slightly increased the vibrancy and that, in my humble opinion, really improved the wall's color. But then I thought the purple jerseys distracted too much from the skater in the white shirt. So I tried a different treatment, one with vibrancy really slashed and saturation reduced, though not as much as the first attempt.

Any opinions and C&C for these two shots? Do you think the purple jersey's in the first are overpowering?

By the way, the shot was ISO800, f/5.6, 1/30 second, no flash and zoomed to 170mm. I post-processed it is in Aperture.


Heavily reduced saturation with increased vibrancy.


Lightly reduced saturation, heavily reduced vibrancy.

[Donald]

In terms of colour and tone, I like the first one. But that's just personal preference and I'm colour-blind anyway!

What I really like is the movement and power in the picture. There's a real energy that isn't easy to capture in a still image.

[IzzieK]

I am with Donald here, he just beats me to it by 2 hours. I like #1 better for the colour -- it sort of enhanced the main skater instead of distract from her.

[John 2]

This is a great concept. The first one for me as well for all the reasons already given but the face to the right is less bright and therefore less distracting in that one as well. You could take it down a bit more IMHO.

[picsfrommt]

John, I'd agree that the face of the girl on the right could be toned down a bit, but I'm kind of struggling on it. Her face is already kind of distorted from motion blur. I'm having a hard time doing anything that doesn't just make it look fake. So far, this is the best I've come up with.



I'd love to say that I had the concept fully planned out in my head before shooting, but that wouldn't be entirely true. The action during a practice if pretty chaotic. The best I can do is to try to keep the center AF spot on a skater that I think will be the center of action. (Smarter focusing modes didn't seem to work all that well. Seems the camera wants to choose a different subject than what I want to choose.) This means I get the subject mostly in focus. It also means that I cropping out a lot of my image in PP to get some kind of a composition.

I did shot this with a slow shutter speed, hoping for some nice motion blur. So that part I did have planned out. This time I think I got good motion blur. Most times I don't.

As far as the rest of the planning, I never know where each one of the girls will go and how the others will react. So I just guess when and where something interesting might happen, aim there, and press the shutter.

And Donald, if you think this shot showed power, you should see the actual skating. It's almost scary. Hard to believe they do it for fun.

[Mike Buckley]

I also prefer the first one (and that includes preference over the third one). The powerful interaction going on between the two primary women is nothing short of amazing.

Consider blurring the woman in the top left area and the lower purple clothing at the far right frame just a little to ensure that the viewer's eye doesn't waver away from the obvious subject.