I took this photo the other day, and I’m fairly happy with how it turned out. I’ve been really enjoying photography in recent months, so I figured I’d share any bike-related experiments with you all.
Also, biking downtown is so much fun. I know the 2nd Ave bike lane is old news at this point, but it is such a great part of our city. It’s also a reminder of the kind of safety-focused changes we can make to our streets when the excellent engineers at SDOT have full political support from City Hall. If protected bike lanes like these can work in congested downtown Seattle, they can work anywhere.
As for the photo, I’m still learning what’s possible with “modern” cameras and editing software after more than a decade of only having my phone’s camera (I put “modern” in quotes because I bought a used Sony A6000 from 2014 and am repurposing lenses from my 1970s Canon film camera). You still can’t beat a phone camera in terms of practicality, but I’ve been trying to bring my other camera with me more often.
This photo took a long time to get, and my method was funny and perhaps not the best. I tried to use the yellow plastic post as a tripod and then use the timer function to take a motion-blurred photo as someone biked by. Focus is a tiny bit soft because I think the plastic post moved in the wind ever so slightly. It also would have been a lot easier to time the shots if I had a shutter remote. Instead I had to try to estimate when someone was 10 seconds away.
Comments
3 responses to “Photo: Biking downtown”
I like the composition. It looks like you had the camera horizontal, but you cropped it vertical — is that right? If so, was that to fit into this blog’s format? I would like to see the horizontal version, although I can see why you would want a vertical orientation. This emphasizes the skyscrapers, which in turn draws you to the bike path, making it look like it goes on forever. I think the main thing is I would want a little more space on the side.
I also wouldn’t mind seeing it with a faster exposure. This is just personal preference (I always liked sports photography). I am very much an amateur when it comes to photography, and have taken mostly natural landscape photos (capturing urban scenes a very different thing). It wouldn’t surprise me if there are people who know more about photography that would disagree with both ideas.
I took some landscape and some portrait. This one was taken portrait, so not much cropping.The blur was what I was going for. It was so bright that I needed to use an ND filter to get it slow enough (which is what I was practicing).
Tom, just discovered this on my Nikon s7000, which has wi-fi. I believe yours has Wi-Fi also. The app that works with my Nikon will let one do a remote control of the camera. In my case I can zoom in and out, change settings and click the shutter.