[Rob Barron]

Went for a little walk on Boxing Day along the sea-front at Sandbanks and there were a couple of people out on their new toys. I didn't take my camera with me deliberately as my wife had her new toy, a Canon S5 IS compact digital and I wanted her to shoot away. As it happened she ended up chinwagging to friends most of the time so I thought I'd put it through its paces and see just what a compact can do. It has a good optical zoom on it so I tried it out on this guy who was a fair way from me, I would reckon about 100 yards (though I have cropped a little off in Postpro also). I had pre-focused on this spot predicting where he was about to come out of the surf and got it pretty much right. See what you think.

Cheers,
Rob

[JMitchell]

Looks good for a compact, but I think the way his body detail is visible is either something your did in pp or some weird light thing, is well....weird, and it would work better if his whole body was a silhouette

[Sonsey]

The S5 is certainly showing it's quality there Rob, you did very well getting that shot from it!

I like Jack's idea of processing this to silhouette the skier, could give the shot a bit more impact.

[fionaB]

i like this, and im kinda gonna disagree with Iain and Jack, i like the way the light is hitting his shoulder and bringing out just a little bit of detail, it makes the skier far more real for me...... ( he must be mad tho! )

Fi

[Rob Barron]

I must say I go with Fiona, I felt that a complete silhouette would look flase as the light source is clearly not directly behind or even close to that. Sorry Jack but no, the lighting on his body has not been changed in Photoshop. This photo has had the following adjustments only:

Cropped
Very shallow S-curve to increase contrast slightly
Slight boost to saturation selective in waves only.

All the adjustments are very slight indeed as I wanted to keep it close to how it came out of camera but just tweaked to get the best out of it. Although I love silhouettes, if the lighting is not behind the subject I feel a touch of detail is preferable than a completely black outline. Only my own opinion of course, just I feel that is more natural.

Got to say I am very pleased with what the S5 can produce, I did a review of it so if you want to read more, do take a look under the review section.

I totally agree with you Fiona.... this guy must be mad

Cheers and happy new year all,
Rob

[nichpr]

I wouldn't disagree with either opinion [silhouette vs detail] because this is one of those shots that can be used in multiple ways. It has graphic simplicity, so it will works well with a bold silhouette against the clean light bg and it works from a photo journalistic perspective as is because there is enough detail there for the viewer to see and understand the story.

So, it just depends on how the artist [or client] wants to use the image. I'd say its a good job here producing an image that can be used in multiple ways. Probably a good image for stock.