June: month in review
June: some stuff going quite quickly (and some stuff that’s not)…
British Superbikes, Knockhill
Sony A9ii | 345mm f/9.0 1/125s ISO 100
What’s this month’s image? It’s a shot from the British Superbikes meet at Knockhill in mid-June. It’s also one of many photographs of motorbikes that were taken over the course of the month.
Did you do anything to it? If the image is sharp and well-exposed there’s little to do on this type of shot. It’s been cropped, sharpened and the contrast / saturation tweaked. In my mind the key to successful images is shutter speed - if you can get the shutter slow enough to capture and convey movement, then that does most of the work.
What’s it doing here? June was a largely quiet month after the mayhem of May’s assorted trips and holiday. The middle of the month saw the annual trek north for the British Superbikes’ circus. It’s the premier bike meet in the year for Knockhill and saw an excellent turnout in general as well as from the club.
The main challenge for the day, apart from the early start, was the bright sunlight on the day. As the shutter speed drops (and at times I was shooting at 1/60s) then you need to close the aperture to stop the highlights from clipping. I also added a polarising filter to help cut down some of the reflections and give me a couple of extra stops leeway. It’s well worth thinking about whenever you want to drag the shutter in bright conditions.
Without being immodest, I’m quite pleased with some of the results. A couple of years ago I’d have been quite happy with getting any images in the frame. This time I took the deliberate decision to see how low I could go with the shutter speed and accept a high wastage rate. The bottom line is that most of the images I was happy with were shot between 1/60s and 1/125s. For my taste, lower than that and the images start to suffer from all sorts of blur; higher and they risk starting to look a little static.
There were also a couple of trips out to the Speedway, as much for the entertainment as the photography. The meets included an absolutely epic battle between Glasgow Tigers and Edinburgh Monarchs, where the final result was in the balance until the very last heat. I’m hard pushed to think of the last time I had so much fun for £20!
Have you been up to much else? It’s been a stay-at-home month, which combined with having several card loads of bike images to sort and process rather limited opportunities. There were, however, a couple of club outing to Rouken Glen and Loch Lomond, while we managed to get out for a walk around the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park. I also took a couple of picture of flowers, which is nice…
Finally, I’m also enjoying the process of pulling together panels of images from trips or walks. I took a visitor out to experience the delights of Falkirk in the early part of the month; I’m quite pleased with the panel below.
The Kelpies, Falkirk.
Fujifilm X-T3 720nm conversion, various settings
Coming Up
We’ve a couple of trips to the seaside planned, but apart from that the diary is quite empty…
