F-Stop Junkie

I'll add my name to the Brisa B26. So well sorted... Hopefully my next bike will get close...

Can't believe I'm actually replying, but I use the blue top American Crew wax, the really strong hold stuff...

Hehehe, you'll regret that :P Odd red tinge which could be taken out in Photoshop. Could have done with a good burst of flash there, but cameras are often fooled by strong backlights. Technically good. Lack any sense of drama, and background is distracting Good, that half-shadow really shows how well dSLRs cope with shadow details. Light background and especially the little light circle bottom left is a touch distracting. Great sky though Nice composition, especially with the take off, landing and riders looking on. Shame the rider's blurred though. Higher shutter speed next time... Better, though still a touch soft. Good timing, but the landscape format cuts off the takeoff and landing, unless you assume it's the bricks you can *just* see at the bottom, and those could be an inch off the ground. However... This is much better. Good pose, great expression, and a much better sense of what he's riding at. Careful on your tweaking though, either he was very red faced, or the skin tones are starting to wander. Too low shutter speed, and I still hate head-on photos. Good. Nice bit of fill flash to illuminate the rider. Shame the sky was so featureless. Hmm, I think there's more manipulation going on. Again, it's the skin tones that are giving it away. Could have been more dramatic if the camera was a bit lower. Is he going up or down? Just can't tell... Ahem. Good timing, but I guess the light was failing, and the shutter speed was coming down. This is good. The rider is sharp, but bits of the bike are blurred, giving a sense of motion. The rider in the background is a bit of a distraction though. Good exposure, but I hate bum shots... Bars covering the rider's eyes, and you can't see the landing. You need to learn how to play flash against shutter speed. Night shooting is a bit of a special skill on it's own. Good tight shot of the rider, who really stands out. Good.

Oh hush Rob, damn Nikon users :P) From a quick bit of research, the Canon lens gets the nod. Take care, because it's not a tank of a lens, but it'll be a good starter. But - for the love of God - please don't use a 2x screw on converter. You have a good, long lens. Use it, your images will look so much better! The range of the lenses isn't halved, it's multiplied by 1.6x. So a 50mm lens becomes 80mm. Important to keep in mind if you need a wide angle lens. As for the 256MB card, apparently users are receiving them in about 3 weeks or so, and certainly worth having if they're free. A gig card will store a whole heap of images, especially if you're shooting jpeg. Don't skimp and get a cheapy, a quality card will write faster and also download faster.

Sorry Rob, don't mean to piss on your strawberries. The whole Canon Vs Nikon debate is almost a religious war. Enjoy your new toy, and keep up the great shots!

Damn Nikon users... Right, let me offer a little balance here. Being a Canon user myself (along with, I might add, all the top MTB photographers in the UK, as well as the majority of press and sport photographers world wide) then I have found the Canon dSLRs to have outstanding build quality, and really great ergonomics. Not to mention excellent support from third-party equipment manufacturers and software providers (Not something you'll find with the encrypted white balance data in Nikon RAW files!) The kit lens may not be the greatest lens available - Some people nickname it the dog toy - there are plenty of others available, including very well priced lenses from Sigma and Tamron which you can use. Plus if you already have some Canon EF lenses, then why junk them, and have to buy them all over again? Save money, save time, buy Canon, start shooting. Plus the Canon 'L' lenses give gorgeous pictures... As far as megapixels go, yes you won't notice a huge difference between 6 and 8 mp (and I've done huge prints off 6.1mp, as anyone at Hookwoods will attest to) but it does mean you have more image data per picture, and if you crop your image a little, then you can quickly turn a 6 mp image into a 4 mp one. Start with 8, crop, and end up on 6. At the end of the day, you'll find Nikon users and Canon users. It's very rare to find someone who has used both. You'll get good pictures with either, but if you have Canon glass, and you're used to how Canon's work, then go Canon. If you didn't, then I'd suggest going to Jessops and trying them both. They're both good cameras, it's more a case of finding one that you find easy, logical and comfortable to use.

Rugog farm was near Powys from memory, and I think 2002? Also involved downhill races with some fire aspect that I can't remember... Baz, are you thinking that Llangollen was the one which followed the stream down the hill, with parking split between two fields?

Not to mention that this rim has already been posted within this link

I couldn't have put it better myself. I've only missed two years the show has been running - '95 and '04. I've threatened to leave jobs over it, stressed over it, commentated at it, and every single moment has been amazing. My Bikeshow Dream

Singletrack Story We don't know why, visitor numbers seem up, there's a good selection of riders attending, but no more show. Right, all down to the Cycle show (Y) EDIT: I've checked the BikeBiz story. Numbers weren't up, but the show did make money, and visitors were keen with the riding displays. One quote asked what Future will do without a show, and if it'll go on hiatus next year, then come back in 2007 perhaps back under Future Publishing control, or perhaps they'll persuade Chris Holman back? Maybe not...

Yup, digital is the way forward, and now with the Nikon D50 and Canon 350D there's little excuse! Especially as all your accessories carry over. I do sometimes hanker for film, especially looking at some of the transparencies I've taken in the past, but unless I get a lot more time, digital all the way.

Mike, I've gone back and added a little more detail to my comments above. If want to discuss anything further, then please PM or MSN me... I agree to an extent about a raw photo, and that it should be right when you take the photo, but then I only indulge in minor tweaks (cropping, brightness, etc...) which are things which could generally be done in a traditional darkroom. A lot of great photographers take shite pics, but then have darkroom wizards who pull out a great image. Even Ansel Adams was a keen darkroomist! I think I'll try and gather a few of my favourite from the year together - but not my comp entries! See what my style is like. Was there ever a consensus on a photog's ride one day?

Ok Mike, it's time for my comments. All constructive, some positive I hope (Y)) Good colours in the sky, and also the backlighting on the... thing. Perhaps a little tweaking in PS needed to really bring out the colours. That hair or something needs cloning out too. Interesting shape though. Could you have gotten a slightly higher vantage point or something like that, and used a tele lens to flatten the perspective. There's a little too much dead space in the middle for my liking. If the buildings at the bottom were cropped out, I don't know if it would make it better or worse. Needed a little higher shutter speed to really freeze the rider. A little too much sky with a busy background and bottom third. Crop out the circular bit top and bottom and it would be better. Blown out sky, but then it's a very tricky exposure to do, and it's gotten the important bit of the rider, take off and landing! Could have worked better landscape with less foreground and sky? Never had a head on shot I've been happy with. Nice inclusion of the arcing thing in the background to add a sense of scale, and provide interest thought out the picture, but this is really blurred. Looks like a bad lens add-on rather than low shutter speed. All out of focus, but otherwise good colour and pose. These shadows are the only time you can get away with a rear view of a rider, during the day all you'd get is a view of their rear... Typical mistake when taking a photo of a person, instinctively putting their head in the middle of the frame. Go in tighter and make sure they fill the frame, especially when the background doesn't add anything like here. Lovely and sharp though! Edit: Having read Mike's comments, I really don't think that the background brings out the rider. It's more like cammoflage, where I would want contrast to really make the subject pop out the photo. Given that composition was chosen like that, I take back that comment. Like it. Crop the black top and bottom, but keep the circular bits. Follows the rule of thirds, but somehow doesn't quite work. The rider is just too small, and too far away to work well. Plus there's an errant bit of wheel on the right which could be cloned out, and the rail end nearest the camera isn't in focus. edit: The rule of thirds basically says that things look nice when arranged in thirds, or hit the line between two of the thirds. In this case, the rider is in the top third of the picture, but it leaves two third of nothing but rail. What I'd have perhaps done is gotten lower, flattened out the rail so it filled the bottom third, then had the rider bigger in the picture. Odd pink tint too. Why was this fisheyed? Again, the back of a rider too. Flash is a little on the strong side too. Interesting to exagerate the perspective from high, rather than low down like normal. One thing I've just noticed too is that the flash isn't designed for the fisheye adapter, and hence there's a strong pool of light, with darker edges where the flash has gone off. Could be a cool effect that. Now this I like. What I would suggest though is crop it to a panorama, removing the railings and sky out. The bottom half of the image is good though, nice and sharp, with a sense of depth and strong contrast between the rider and background. Horrible blurry lens attachment! Not nice. Plus, the landing is so close the takeoff in terms of composition and colour that it looks more like a drop of a foot onto gravel, rather than a gap jump. Good. Sharp, bit of DoF. Nice pose too, got the timing just right so you can quickly see what move is being done, from where, to where and so on... Just covering his eyes, which is a shame, but otherwise good lighting and exposure, with a good use of fisheye here. Would be a good first frame of a sequence. For a standalone shot, it just looks like you shot too early. Too much nothing, around a very well lit rider. There's a lot of cropping opportunities here, as the foreground is rather dull and dark, but the tree and rider are very well lit indeed! Could do a thin, tall crop, or even just loose the entire bottom third of the image! Generally these shots are good, and certainly better than most. The cheap screw on lens attachments do ruin a few otherwise good shots. I'd suggest for the future that you critique these yourself Mike, and that will give you a guide for future shooting opportunities. Maybe look at pre-focussing techniques for low light pics too to help keep them sharp. Finally, investigate DoF and how you can alter it. Some of these shots - especially the Mike Burrows one - would have worked much better with a shallow depth of field. Start to grasp this, and you could really enhance your work!

Though, to be picky, this won't work if you have red-eye reduction enabled on your camera, or you have a fancy camera that fires a pre-flash (most dSLRs) for flash metering...

There were video guys from Onza there, so I would expect a proper release in the future. Why do you expect video to come flowing from TF? Yes, people do shoot video at some events and release it, but not everywhere. I'm sure if people wanted to release it, they would, but otherwise be lucky that you get any at all. I remember not so long ago there was barely any video you could download, and more often that not, you had to know who you could borrow a home made VHS tape off of. We've come a long way baby. Be thankful for how much there is.

As it says in the rules, one action, one non-action. You can enter one per category. You don't have to enter both categories though

Or a Surly rim? 65mm wide, double box design, nice.

Once again, I've ammended the rules in the first post. These are the final rules as we have to play by. Let the snapping commence!

Why is this so hard to define? One camera club I know have a rule for their print or slide competitions. The rule is that an image is an image. You can argue till the cows come home about how it was done, real filters vs ps filters, etc, etc. So, in the interests of getting things moving, how's about we say that any image is allowed. Since this is done with a public vote rather than panel of judges, we'll let the TF world say what they like. Max res of 1024 along the longest edge. Images must be taken by the entrant. Everything else is fair game. Entries sent to me by 01/01/06, where I will put up a series of topics with a poll in each. Winner goes through. Details with each image must include a name for the image and your real and TF name. Any extra details will be posted alongside the image.

Frankly, that's bollocks. You don't know if you've got the shot instantly - never stopped me when I was shooting film. Drop the negs or slides into a scanner, and you're back in the digital realm. A photo is a photo. The video comps were never MiniDV vs 16mm...

Yeah, yeah, very clever. Stuff can be done in camera, or in a darkroom and rephotographed. Rather than me dictating here, lets get some other people saying how far they'd push the manipulation thing... My view is you either allow all manipulation, or very limited amounts.

Sorry, it's how you'd do sequence shots in a darkroom... The darkroom is a wonderful place, but I'm keen to keep this a 'pure' competition, otherwise it goes to the best Photoshop Wiz, of which there's a few here!

If you supply photos of you doing it, along with masks or rubber solution, then ok. Seriously though, if you're capturing more than one image, do a video. Then you can do 24 every second!

Nope.

It's a fotherington-sorbe light capture engine. Comes with an attractive teak tripod and turned brass feet. It's quite fetching!