[jobe]

Hi another quarterly post from me, the southern finals of England's Strongets Man were held at the Gunwharf in Portsmouth today, took a few shots of the competitors some of them were built like houses, made me feel slim.
The weather was a little too bright had a few harsh shadows and blown highlights, but still had a few keepers that can be seen here : Englands Strongest Man Photo Gallery by Wayne Jobe at pbase.com

I used my 70-200 f4L, although I had it wide open, it didnt give me enough bokeh to hide the distracting background.

Wayne

[danpen]

Great look on this guy's face, real concentration. The way the muscles are stressed gives a good feel for how much effort he's having to expend.

Shame you've got some wasted space at the top of the image but have lost his legs at the bottom, cropping a bit off the top would help.

If you wanted that blurred background and have PS you can use the lens blur filter blur the crowd a bit, mask out the subject and then use two or three shades of grey to mask the rows of the crowd as they go back in the distance. Then the lens blur filter can be used to blur the people at the back more than the people at the front.

Can try and explain better if you're interested.

cheers

Dan

[P-E]

Yes great concentration you have captured

Originally Posted by danpen

If you wanted that blurred background and have PS you can use the lens blur filter blur the crowd a bit, mask out the subject and then use two or three shades of grey to mask the rows of the crowd as they go back in the distance. Then the lens blur filter can be used to blur the people at the back more than the people at the front.

Can try and explain better if you're interested.

I would be interested to know how to do that Dan

Cheers Ian.

[danpen]

I'm just on my way out but I'll post something this evening,

cheers

Dan

[HHRC]

This is a great capture of expression and sense of motion. You dont need to know what he's lifting to know its heavy and hard work! would be great to see a re edit version with the blur technique applied. I dont know too much about photoshop so am interested to see what things it is capable of.

[Dave]

Catches the immense effort required to to lift those weights well

[Rob Barron]

Even at f4 it would be hard to get much more blur than that when using the 200mm end (which i am guessing you were here) as the distance between the BG people and this guy is relatively small compared to the distance between the guy and you. If you were up close to this guy (I dare you! <g>) and used a 50mm lens at f4, you'd get a much stronger blurring but of course the practicalities of shots like this make it nigh on impossible.

You can add blur as Danpen has mentioned but be careful as it is very easy to make it look unnaturally blurred if you over do it. The picture here still grabs your attention onto the strong man so it works fine and the BG people simply add context to the shot so I don't think it's as big a problem as you are seeing.

Cheers,
Rob

[danpen]

I've finally managed to find time to create a tutorial here, I hope it's understandable. I also applied similar techniques to this image to show what's possible.



As Rob says you have to be really careful doing this sort of thing else it just looks rubbish. It never looks as good as doing it in camera when you can and it's a lot more effort to do it in PS as well. However when, as here, it can't be done in camera good processing in PS can save the day.

cheers

Dan

[jobe]

Thanks for the comments guys, I tend to agree with Rob on trying to blur the background with PS but Danpen's tutorial is very good, nice job on the DOF.
I will definately give that a go.
Thanks again
Wayne