The trails east of Peat's Hill are super close to town (obviously) and they are actually pretty fun. Not very technical or difficult, but very flowy lots of ups and downs and twists and turns and...cows. But that's beside the point.
The scenery of the trails is just amazing, they're surrounded by farmland, with the mountains off in the distance. The trails surround this little valley, with the autumn colors in full bloom. There's rich reds, yellows, and oranges, all with rich green grass and ribbons of single track winding it's way through.
I chose two locations to shoot today, one up top of the valley, next to the farmland, and one down in the midst of an aspen grove.
The first, and most complicated problem I ran into was timing. I was shooting myself, and my remote trigger was not working very well. That might have had something to do with me trying to trigger it with my teeth while riding....but still, there was a major problem here. Timing can be everything in a photo, so I needed a way to at least get really close.
First idea was to use the self timer...I gave up on that pretty quick. 10 seconds is really hard to judge, and even harder when you need to be in an exact spot at exactly the right time while riding fast. Just not going to happen...
What else could I use to trigger the camera...if only I had a way for it to take a bunch of photos continuously. That way it would get me from when I start to when I stop or shut off the camera, and hopefully the moment in between that I want.
One word, intervelometer. :)
Sadly, the shortest interval it can take is 1s, but it's better than nothing. I also set a delay of 6 seconds so that I could start riding before the pictures started, and a max of 10 pictures because that's really all I needed. I didn't want 30 pictures of me riding back to the camera...that would fill up card fast.
Now that I had my timing figured out (sort of), it was on to framing. The section of trail I wanted had very right framing. To the right was fence and farmland, which was pretty but I didn't want to include it, and to the left was the valley and then the city in the background. Uhg, no city. So with my horizontal boundaries already in place, I just had to figure out the up and down. Like I talked about yesterday, you should put the horizon on the upper third line if you want to emphasize the foreground. Which I did.
A chance factor that makes the photo, actually the reason why I chose this location, was a little S curve in the trail. It makes a natural place for the eye to focus, and with the biker just at the beginning of it, it leads the eye down the trail and to who knows where. It's trying to evoke that sense of endless trails...just wanting to get over the next hill to see what's coming, and then to the next, and the next, and the next!
I shot at ISO200, f7.1, and 1/250. I wanted a fairly wide depth of field, hence f7.1, and then to get a fast enough shutter to freeze me, I needed to bump the ISO up a bit. Since I was riding directly away from the camera on just that little section of trail, my motion relative to the camera was minimal. If I had just been going right to left, I would have needed to use a much fast shutter to freeze me.
I also used a polarizer to darken the sky a bit. It didn't help much, but it gave that little bit I needed to not have a blown out sky.
Editing for this one was more complete than others recent. I first darkened the sky a bit with a gradient filter. Upping the contrast, darkening the shadows, and upping the clarity help to bring out more detail in the blown out bits. I also lowered the exposure a bit and raised the highlights. This gave me more mid tones, but kept the bright whites.
Now for the foreground. I did the opposite to it. I brightened it up a bit, and added some contrast. Actually, brightened it up a lot, and upped the highlights a ton. It was a pretty flat day, so I need to add the light back. In a perfect world (where I have time), I would have just waited for the light. But I didn't have time, so post will have to do :(
As for the aspen grove picture, I won't go into details since it's not the photo of the day, but if you really want to know, ask in a comment and I'll write something up. I think the first photo is much better...
See you tomorrow!
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