A RIDE THRU THE GLOWING LIGHT

With my children being big into mountain biking, I end up at many of the mountain bike races throughout the country. This was taken in 2010 in Cullinan and I decided to take a walk through the woods to try and capture something different and with not too many people around. The mud and the water obviously caught my eye as a great potential for some action. Unfortunately the light was coming from the back of the cyclists, which is not ideal as it would have been preferable to have the light coming from the front. I could not resist the action, as I said of the mud and the water and decided to go for the image with back lighting. A few weeks ago while I was going through many images to find something new for the Salons both here and overseas, I decided that this had potential to do something with. I love playing around in photoshop and trying new things and I kept bearing in mind that I could not enter it into a sports category but could enter it into Pictorial. I tweaked the levels here and there, pushed up the saturation a bit, then I duplicated the layer. I then blurred the layer to get a soft feel about it but brought back in the cyclist to be sharp in the image. His face was also a bit dark so I dodged his face to bring more light onto it. After flattening the image, it still did not have impact so I then went through many filters to see what I could do to have some stronger impact. CS6 has a new feature of Colour Look up Adjustment Layer with many filters and I played around with some of them, plus adjusting sliders along the way. I eventually got the image as seen. A huge learning when doing things like this is to jot down exactly what you did or save the master as a psd file.

The original image was taken with the D3S – 70-200 lens at 70 mm focal length, 1/320 sec on F.7, ISO 500, hand held on Aperture Priority.

This image has done well in Salons here, getting COMs and also overseas to the extent now that I cannot use it anymore for Salon entries as I am over my limit of usage.

For me another lesson was go back and look at some of your old images, try new things with them, experiment and you can be lucky – what was it Gary Player said the more you practice the luckier you get.

Evelyn Gibson 6* (FPSSA, EPSSA, AFIAP, ARPS)