I’ve just back from a week’s skiing with a new clutch of images that I am slowly working through. However, this panel of four was taken in a previous year.
Skiing is a very dynamic sport – athletic, fast-paced, aggressive in the way a slope is attacked, but also graceful. Watching a skier execute turns with the sun behind him demonstrates something of the skill that we have to learn to be competent skiers. Each turn kicks up snow that hangs in the air, backlit by the sun.
The series of four images above spans two seconds during which the skier changes direction twice. Using continuous focus, capture was not too difficult. Processing was harder. You would think that four images taken in a narrow arc so rapidly would all have exactly the same exposure and could easily be batch processed. Not so: there were subtle differences that needed correcting and I’m still not entirely happy with the results. But they do show the athletic, just-in-control, attacking style of this skier.
Click on the image for an enlarged view.
If I may be allowed to say….the first shot has the best background of snow flying (like a wave almost), the second shot has the best action turn. the third shot has the best exposure and focus, and the fourth has the best sliding turn, but could do with a wee bit more light (exposure) on the skier’s body 🙂
(I’m looking at this post late at night, not during natural daylight).
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Many thanks for your comments Vicki, and for your fair critique. If only I could shout at the skier: ‘could you go back up the slope and we’ll shoot that again’! Photography of skiers in action is not easy but it’s always good to set ourselves a challenge
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I think you did very well. I don’t have any images of skiers back 35 years ago when I spent time up in the alps, but the one photo of me on skies is hilarious.
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I don’t have any images of me skiing. I dread to think whatI look like!
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Great captures!
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Thanks Sue
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Wonderful series, Andy — you’ve really captured both the sense of movement and the skier’s grace. Nice job on the backlighting, too! It adds an extra-ethereal element to your images.
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Thanks Heide. Whenever I attempt this type of action photography I try to shoot towards the sun so that the snow kicked up by the turns gets backlit. That flying snow adds so much to the images.
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They’re really nice, Andy, and that’s got to be very difficult, photographing a skier coming towards you. But I know you had fun!
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Thanks Lynn. They don’t all turn out right. For every good image there are probably ten that go straight in the Trash.
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