Bouldering

After I finally got my car fixed today (hopefully....), I went with out to this bouldering rock with some friends. They wanted to climb some, but I just wanted to take pictures, of course. There was, and is, a room waiting to be packed, so there wasn't much time to spend there and I only got a few pictures in.

I brought all my whole back pack to the boulder, but I only used my camera and a polarizer filter. Sometimes all you need is the sun to take good pictures. I could have used a flash for a little fill light, but I was happy with how the natural light looked. Plus, there were a ton of people there so I didn't want to intrude that much.

The goal of the photo was to silhouette someone against the sky and take out all of the ground. To do that, I shot from a low angle and at about 50mm on my zoom lens. I used a polarizer to darken the sky, luckily I was shooting at almost 90 degrees to the sun, and that's when you can darken the sky the most.

The biggest challenge was just to try to predict and time the climbers so they'd be in the frame and in the right place when I took the picture. I don't think they took the same line twice, so it was hard to get the angel and framing right. Out of luck really did I get the picture I was looking for. I had the rock filling most the image, with the climber hanging off the side.

When you're shooting moving subjects, it's important to think way ahead if you can. It's almost impossible to just shoot from the hip and hope you get something good. It can help if you frame your shot first, then wait for you subject to move into the frame. This way, you aren't focused on following the subject everywhere and then trying to compose the shot. It takes more time to follow the subject, and you'll be more shaky and less prepared usually. The times you would follow your subject would be if you want to get motion blur in the background, or you just have absolutely no idea where the subject is going to be at any given time. If you do follow your subject, try to frame ahead of them, this way, you are trying to think ahead, and from natural lag you'll be right on time. Usually.

Anywho, I'm sure I'll talk about this more this summer as I shoot more biking and whatnot.

In Lr, I converted the image to b/w first. I don't really like the image in color. I lowered the luminosity of the blues to further darken the sky, then raised the oranges and reds to brighten his skin up a bit since it was in shadow.

I raised the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, and blacks to brighten up the image even more. I also raised the clarity a bit to help bring a bit of drama to the image.

Well that's about it, gotta get back to packing. See you tomorrow.