Skate pics from today

First two IMO are missing a pop! This would be given by a bit of fill flash!

Flash on the christmas list i think!

Yeah these shots could definitely use some flash. One skateboard photographer I know takes Strobes along with him to his shoots. Makes a huge difference and really pops the skater. Check out some of his stuff at: http://briangarson.com​/

Being a noob myself I may be wrong, but to me the first two look like they're just underexposed a bit. The sun is in the skater's face so I'm not sure if some fill flash would do any good. I had a go with the first one in PS, but I can't post it unless you say it's ok. I'm a noob with PS as well, but I think it looks pretty good. The third one looks great, but this one I think could've been better with some fill flash. One thing I was curious about was what time you took these. According to the exif data, they were taken at almost 9:00 pm. I can't imagine that it's that light at that time of night in TX.

Part of the advantage of fill flash is that you can slightly underexpose the background, pop the skater with the flash, and it makes them stand out as the focal point of the scene. Plus if light is getting lower, shutter speeds may get too low to freeze the skater. The flash will effectivly freeze their motion with lower shutter speeds.

I can definitely see the flash being a benefit even outdoors. The photographer you linked to certainly gets great results. Unfortunately for cronu, he doesn't have one and the light seems quiet sufficient to get good results without a flash. He shot the first one at 1/8000, f5.6, ISO 800. Definitely room to open it up a bit. I wonder if the first one was underexposed by shooting Av and having a fair amount of sky in the shot?

Thanks for the coments posted. I really liked that photographers work at that link. All of these shots were takin in the late afternoon from 3-5pm and it gets dark at a little before 6. I shot all of them in M and i am still trying to figure out the best settings for the amount of light that i have. I will be getting a flash for christmas for sure! its a must, but i just droped all my money on the combo i have now. I have been reading lots on here and it has been great getting an idea on things.. thanks alot!

Tadrscin- I would love to see what ya did with that pick in PS. please do post

OK, I really have to do something about my monitor at work. I looked at the pic at home and it does look better, but still underexposed and flat. I went ahead and had another go at it and here's what I ended up with. Unfortunately I forgot to write down some of the changes I did, but this should be close. I used Levels and changed the highlight slider to around 210, midtones to .75 and shadows to 8. Next I used the Shadow/Highlight and set the shadow amount to 0% and the highlights to 2% with a radius of 10. Then I changed the saturation of the red channel to -33. Finally I did some light noise reduction with Noise Ninja and sharpened using Unsharpen Mask with an amount of 124, radius of .4 and a threshold of 1. Again this is all through the eyes of a fellow noob. Let me know what you think. I asked about shooting in Av because according to the exif data you shot 1 & 3 in Av mode and 2 in manual.

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tadrscin wrote in post #2359456
OK, I really have to do something about my monitor at work. I looked at the pic at home and it does look better, but still underexposed and flat. I went ahead and had another go at it and here's what I ended up with.

Nice recovery tadrscin. Looks a quite a lot better than the original, and the subject pops!

That worked out lots better for sure tadrscin. I just started do some photography and PS about a month ago and definatly have a long road of learning ahead. thank for the info, it was very helpful.

aacmckay wrote in post #2359688
Nice recovery tadrscin. Looks a quite a lot better than the original, and the subject pops!

Thanks. I wish I understood what I'm doing in PS more, but this is a good start. It's amazing what you can save in PS. I've saved quite a few of my really bad shots which I guess is good PS practice. I just need to work on the consistency in the camera so this isn't needed.

cronu wrote in post #2359829
That worked out lots better for sure tadrscin. I just started do some photography and PS about a month ago and definatly have a long road of learning ahead. thank for the info, it was very helpful.

I used to be heavily into B&W photography years ago and I'm just now getting back into photography, but now with a digital camera. I've been using PS for a while, but I only knew a few basics and they turned out to be wrong anyway. From reading this forum I've learned to not use the Brightness and Contrast controls and instead use Levels, Curves and Highlight/Shadows. Right now I'm reading a book called Real World Camera RAW by Bruce Fraser which explains how to shoot RAW and make most of your changes using Camera RAW, rather than PS. The basic idea is that you have far more data to work with and so the image quality ends up being better any time you do destructive changes. Plus any destructive changes you do in Camera RAW are less destructive than if you did them in PS. He explains it much better than that, but that's the gist of it. Once I finish that and really get the hang of Camera RAW , I'm going to start really getting into PS and learn how to use masks, layers and all that fun stuff. Of course the idea is to get it as right as possible in the camera so you don't need to do much PP at all. I'm still working on that part.

I have been wondering about shooting in raw, but i have finals and so much stuff right now, my only time to shoot is during some study breaks. I will be done with this semester by the end of the week and if i can get my mind to read anymore i am interested in check that book out by bruce Fraser. Yeah, i have been tryin to take some of my decent shots and make them better and some of the bad ones too. but I definatly would rather learn to make the shots need as little PS as possible. I feel that skateboarding photography would definatley be a little easeir to get interesting shots with a good flash. until then just gonna try and learn my cam as much as possible. thanks again tadrscin for tha help!

Shooting RAW has it's advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage seems to be image quality. The other thing I like is being able to set the white balance in Camera RAW and then apply that same setting to all of my images in Adobe Bridge. I use a reference shot with a grey card and use that to set my WB. Some of the disadvantages of RAW are the large file sizes, they fill up your buffer faster which limits your burst rate, and of course a bit more time doing PP. I've read several threads here debating shooting RAW over jpg and I just figure do what works best for what you're doing. Here's a thread you might read for more info. You'll see many are quite passionate about which way they shoot. https://photography-on-the.net …hp?t=170867&hig​hlight=RAW
This is just a hobby for me so I'm enjoying doing the PP as much as shooting.

Since you haven't purchased your flash yet, I would recommend getting the 580Ex if you can swing it. I couldn't justify the extra $180 or so( I dropped a bunch of cash too!) and went with the 430EX. It's actually really good, but I've already had a few times when I wished I had more power. I've been shooting at an indoor skate park and some of the places I want to shoot from I can't because the 430 won't reach. I could shoot with just the ambient light, but that limits me to my 50 f1.8 right now. Plus I need a lot of practice with the flash anway as that's not my strong suit.

Shoot RAW is the only way to go in my opinion. if I remember my math corectly you can change the exporsure of a shot from EV -1 1/3 to EV +1 1/3 without loosing any data when you convert to JPG. This is because RAW is 12 bits per pixel and not 8 bits per pixel like JPG. If you try to do that with a JPG you will loose information. As mentioned white balance is much nicer in RAW as well. You don't have the chance of getting colour casting which can be a real pain to fix.

As for flashes. Definitely get the 580EX if you can afford it. I think it's 1 stop more powerful. Plus there's the possibility that the Stroboscopic mode could be cool for these kind of shots (freezeing the skater in multiple positions in the path through the air). Totally up to you though. I don't think you'll be dissapointed with either the 580EX or the 430EX.