This week I decided to head to the beach. Was a very nice evening, and wanted to take some photos during “The Golden Hour“. Originally I was going to do a panorama, but when I got down there, another opportunity presented itself.

This is what I came up with (make sure you open this in full size. Thumbnail doesn’t do it justice):-

So, taking this, I shot it at 200mm with the aperture wide open (unfortunately, it’s only at f/5.6 on this lens), I put the ISO up slightly (to 400) so I could keep the speed up high (was trying to aim for 1/1000, but only got 1/640). As I was shooting at such a high speed, vibration reduction was turned off (as it can make your images worse at high speed). White Balance was set to daylight to keep the golden glow. I was shooting in continuous mode capturing JPG’s (rather than RAW which I normally shoot), this was done to keep my frame rate high.

Post processing wise, fairly simple here. Cropped, adjusted the levels, masked out the rider himself and brightened him up (as he was a little dark), masked the sky and darkened it slightly to make the wires show up a bit more.

So, time to critique it. For starters, this is the wrong time of day for sports shots. You don’t really need that golden glow that the hour before sunset gives you. White balance should have been set to “cloudy” as it turned out a bit more orange than it actually was (that said, I don’t mind it too much). I was shooting in aperture priority, whereas I should have been shooting in shutter speed priority to keep it at 1/1000 (and had the camera automatically adjust the ISO). Finally, I should have used my 300mm lens that I have, even though it would have been full manual settings, I would have been able to get a lot more detail (as it is, it’s quite heavily cropped). I had the lens with me, but due to sand/wind, I didn’t really want to change it outside of the car.

Due to this being late in the day, there were only 2 kite boarders out and they were only out for 5-10mins before packing up. Next warm, sunny, windy day, I’ll head back and take some more during the middle of the day with a longer lens (and hopefully get some of a few tricks).

Overall though, I had an awesome time just walking along the beach and snapping off some photos. Can’t wait to get out again (already looking at the forecast)!

As a bonus, I’ve processed one of the other images as well.