On a bike in Mozambique

[Benbro88]

Hi,

I'm just starting to get into photography and was wondering what people thought of this picture. (I don't really think my strength lies in photographing people, so I want to work on this!)



Taken on road in Mozambique this summer.

Any thoughts?

[jiro]

I think you did good here, Ben. You have a main subject (the kids on the bike), there is focus (the main subject is not too blurred), and the background does not take too much attention away from the main subject. Don't take it too hard on yourself. For a start, always ask yourself "does this picture speaks to me?" if not, then look for the reason why you got interested about it in the first place. If it does speak to you then you've made your point and you did a good job. Now go and take some more pictures. I would like to see some more images about these "subject" of yours. Good luck!

[rpcrowe]

First, let me tell you what I like about this image...

It shows people in the context of their daily lives. I really get tired of travel shots of trees, buildings and, oh God, those tiresome regurgitated sunsets. I like to see people as the primary subjects of travel imagery...

The panning of the first bike was really quite good. Panning is not an easy thing to accomplish.

What I would have like to have seen...

A single subject, one of the bikes with some area in front of the bike and passengers. It is difficult (possibly nearly impossible) to effectively pan two separate moving subjects. The blurred bike to the rear of the image keeps competing for my attention.

Flash fill! Unfortunately, flash fill is seldom used in today's photography. It really increases the quality of an image, especially in harsh sunlight and of darker subjects.

The nice thing about today's flash capability is high speed sync. When I was shooting film (a million years ago) the fastest sync speed of my Canon manual focus SLR camera was 1/60 second. It was impossible to use fill outdoors with a focal plane shutter camera because at a shutter speed faster than 1/60 second portions of the frame would not be exposed. Conversely, when using fill flash at 1/60 second, ghost imaging would result.

Even though the intensity of flash is decreased when shooting with high speed sync, I can achieve decent fill since I will shoot at a -1 or -2 stop flash compensation and will use a straight on, unmodified flash.