Rob at the Velodrome

I went over to the Burnaby Velodrome to practice some more remote flash stuff on moving subjects. Learning from my past trip to the Richmond Oval, I placed the flash ahead of the riders, right at about eye level. I also made sure to give it lots of juice.

This is my favourite shot from the day.



I had the same issues with composure and lack of autofocus points, but seem to be getting more skilled at tracking the subject in my viewfinder.

What I've done with this photo, that I haven't done in the past, is spent a lot of time making adjustments using Adobe Camera Raw. It's frustrating because I'm just wandering aimlessly through the controls, using a very subjective method of figuring out what changes are good and what are bad. I can improve in 2 ways: 1) thinking ahead of what look I want to achieve, and 2) applying a principled workflow. I think this will be something I will constantly need to improve on. For this particular photo, I aimed to desaturate and darken the track surface in order to emphasize the subject, while trying to retain natural skin tones. I made some luminance adjustments; bringing up contrast and recovering highlights, corrected lens vignetting, reduced noise (ISO 800), and did some minor sharpening.