High surf in Ventura, CA

aero-nut

Some surfers were enjoying the high surf on the Southern California coast yesterday, making for some photo ops....and since we were in the area for the SoCal dgrin get-together...why not give it a shot..

The wind was blowing strong, thus the cool spray off the breakers..

This is one of my first attempts at catching some sports action shots.

















Shot with 75-300 glass at 1/1250 sec.

Poindexter

I'd say you did a pretty good job for your first time

aero-nut

Poindexter wrote:

I'd say you did a pretty good job for your first time

Thanks! It was definately different than the type of shots I'm used to taking (slow....landscapes don't tend to move much..hehe).

Steve Cavigliano

aero-nut wrote:

Thanks! It was definately different than the type of shots I'm used to taking (slow....landscapes don't tend to move much..hehe).

Very nice Kendall You got some really nice action and some kewl spray For your first time shooting surf shots, you should be very proud of yourself


Looks like pretty tough backlighting. Not much you could do "as shot" except maybe shoot in RAW, over expose and work with the images during post. Even jpgs can be tweaked and most of your images would benefit from some post processing. There are ways to keep that nice backlighting through the wave, yet brighten the rider. You will have work with masks and do some erasing, but it's actually quite simple and only takes a minute.

Good work!!

Steve

aero-nut

Steve Cavigliano wrote:

Very nice Kendall You got some really nice action and some kewl spray For your first time shooting surf shots, you should be very proud of yourself


Looks like pretty tough backlighting. Not much you could do "as shot" except maybe shoot in RAW, over expose and work with the images during post. Even jpgs can be tweaked and most of your images would benefit from some post processing. There are ways to keep that nice backlighting through the wave, yet brighten the rider. You will have work with masks and do some erasing, but it's actually quite simple and only takes a minute.

Good work!!

Steve

Steve,

Thank you! I appriciate the comments. I was shooting in raw all day, but ironically, as soon as I started shooting the surf, I switched to jpg for some faster save times on the camera. Now I realize that probably wasn't the smartest thing to do. I tried doing some PS work on all of the pics...they were a lot worse then what I posted. One of the main problems I ran into is my cheap lens. There was quite a bit of chromatic aberation on most of them, since I was pushing the limits of my 75-300 mm canon bottom of the line telephoto glass. Maybe I'll take a second look at some of them in PS. Do you have any suggestions? I was thinking of masking the skyline out, and doing some level adjustments on the water and rider.

Steve Cavigliano

aero-nut wrote:

Steve,

Thank you! I appriciate the comments. I was shooting in raw all day, but ironically, as soon as I started shooting the surf, I switched to jpg for some faster save times on the camera. Now I realize that probably wasn't the smartest thing to do. I tried doing some PS work on all of the pics...they were a lot worse then what I posted. One of the main problems I ran into is my cheap lens. There was quite a bit of chromatic aberation on most of them, since I was pushing the limits of my 75-300 mm canon bottom of the line telephoto glass. Maybe I'll take a second look at some of them in PS. Do you have any suggestions? I was thinking of masking the skyline out, and doing some level adjustments on the water and rider.

Kendall,
I could see you had done some work when I d/l'd one of your images and blew it up. Lots of articfacts there. With such a small image to work from, I couldn't get rid of them but I was able to brighten the image up quite a bit.



A couple of issues I ran into were the aforementioned artifacts, especially around the rider's head and shoulders, and the backlighting in these areas didn't help at all Anyhow, all I did was brighten it by applying an action called Digital SHO. It acts as sort of a screen layer, but retains most of the contrast. You could get a similar effect from a screen layer or other actions like Katrin Eismanns Fill Flash Action found here Basically create a dup layer and then either use screen blending mode and then enable the layer mask and erase areas that are too bright. Or if I have a small subject like the rider and the backlit part of the wave, I erase everything and then change to white and paint the rider and the wave parts back in If you use an action it's very similar. With SHO I have to create a dup layer first. With the Fill Flash Action you have to adjust opacity, flatten, select and then copy and paste. But once you have the layer in place it's a matter of erasing/painting back in whatever looks good to you

Hope this helps some,
Steve

aero-nut

Steve Cavigliano wrote:

Kendall,
I could see you had done some work when I d/l'd one of your images and blew it up. Lots of articfacts there. With such a small image to work from, I couldn't get rid of them but I was able to brighten the image up quite a bit.



A couple of issues I ran into were the aforementioned artifacts, especially around the rider's head and shoulders, and the backlighting in these areas didn't help at all Anyhow, all I did was brighten it by applying an action called Digital SHO. It acts as sort of a screen layer, but retains most of the contrast. You could get a similar effect from a screen layer or other actions like Katrin Eismanns Fill Flash Action found here Basically create a dup layer and then either use screen blending mode and then enable the layer mask and erase areas that are too bright. Or if I have a small subject like the rider and the backlit part of the wave, I erase everything and then change to white and paint the rider and the wave parts back in If you use an action it's very similar. With SHO I have to create a dup layer first. With the Fill Flash Action you have to adjust opacity, flatten, select and then copy and paste. But once you have the layer in place it's a matter of erasing/painting back in whatever looks good to you

Hope this helps some,
Steve

Steve,

Thanks for posting the adjustment details. Yeah, I was having a heck of a time with the artifacts because of all the other adjustments I was having to make. The lighting was definately not ideal. Oh well...

I still appricaite the input.