Amature skateboarder I shoot for. Tell me what you think of the shots.

Some good action shots there. As always in sports, backgrounds are tough. That first shot is awesome... except for the darn bikes! Mainly because the light is behind your subject, for the most part, he is dark, which makes a great looking silhouette-ish effect, but the bikes perfectly lit from the front... definitely takes away from the effect.

Nice job grabbing good action moments.

Some suggestions: Keep your aperature really open. It will put the background out of focus, and make your subject standout. On the first shot, a fill flash would have helped - dunno if the skateboarders would be OK with that or not.

And for fun, you might try tracking shots. You'll have to experiment to find the right potion of distance, shutter speed, lens and tracking speed - but if you get it right, you'll have nice background blur, and a little blur on the faster moving parts of your subject, while some parts are still in focus. Makes for a nice effect.

Fun stuff, Isaac.

Thank you for the advice. I will try some lighting effects in photo shop on that first one to see if I can draw some light off those darn bikes. I didn't really even notice them when I was shooting.


I shoot for this guy (Micah) all the time, he wants me to help him put together a portfolio. So if it will make the shot look better I can use any lighting I need, plus I can make him do it as many times as it takes to get it right :)


Thanks for your input

Hiya Issac

Nice shots ^5 The 2nd one is my favorite. Good action, very good lighting and super sharp

The 1st one is hurt by that lousy SC Sunshine (not the quality of light, but the direction of it, down by the Wharf), it is sort of washing out some of the left portion of the boarder and the ball/globe/meteor (whatever the dear city father's call that thing). I like the concept of the shot though

The 3rd shot would be great except for the, IMO, very distracting background. Nice action though If possible, a different angle/perspective on this one would really help. Or, maybe as mentioned, a wider aperture to highlight the boarder and blur the background. Still, I'd rather see nothing but air/sky, or at the least some sort of fairly solid light color, as a BG.

Thanks for sharing,
Steve