dandantheadminman
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tips for improving this picso, i took this pic yesterday, but i can a zillion things wrong, and i was wondering if you could take a min to gimme a few tips for next time, to improve it
i think it was: f/3.5 ISO 1000 1/500s 18mm end of my lens
so, what i think is wrong,
slightly too much sky above the drop (i def wanted a bit more than natural just to add a bit of interest
too grainy 
rider outa focus, not sure what went wrong, i thought i autofocuses the drop, but i think i was out (p.s . i trioed manual focusing but it too msity to tell for shit where i was focusing)
exposure is all over the place: i like how the shore is slightly underexposed, but ideally i would also like the rider proeprly exposed, flash compensation the answer?
also, i forgot the tree on left would be much bright than other tree causa flash, lol my bad, shoulda changed angles
soo, you got any ideas for improvement? or any way i couldve improved my technique, thnx
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jetsetdan
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I cant give you any advise here Ad, but i can tell you this...
I like it.. alot.. i don't see anything wrong with it.
I think it carries a nice moody and dark feel to it.
It really does conjour up "ROAM" type images in my head.
I like the darkness and slightly out of focus look to it.
Nothing seems to be to blurred or out of focus for me.
The sky adds the right balance to the overall pic as it is very dark at the bottom.
Hence why i said it would make a perfect dvd cover.. lol 
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Hamish
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Okay. Seeing as you asked...
Let's start with the aperture as it's the first thing you mentioned. f3.5 isn't that sharp on the 18-70DX. It get's better as you stop the aperture down a bit more, with best performance at about f8-11 (as do most consumer lenses). You might have been better to use f4-5.6. You tend to need fast lenses to get sharp results at that sort of range.
ISO1000 should be okay for noise, if you expose properly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine you were using matrix metering and the sky was so bright it underexposed things and the noise got much worse when you brightened it in levels or shadow/highlights in photoshop. I tend to use CW metering for biking shots (or spot) as I find matrix unreliable and I find using manual mode and the preview screen/histogram to check the scene before the rider comes along is a good way to determine exposure.
1/500 should have worked okay for freezing the rider. That DH jump one I posted yesterday was 1/400 and the guy was gunning it.
A tighter crop would have improved things IMHO. I'd imagine that 50mm would have been ideal and then you could have used a nice fast 50 1.8 prime at f2.8 and been able to reduce the ISO and have improved AF due to more light hitting the sensors. That might explain a little bit of the rider being OOF. One trick would have been to try and focus on the start of th landing and use the DOF behind the rider to try and ensure they were in focus (of course that's tricky at wider apertures). I'm also thinking that the dark rider coming straight at the camera might have caused the AF difficulty.
You're right about the flash position. It also illustrates another reason I hate flash in biking pics - the reflections of the strips on the sleeves. I'm going to sound repetitive but if it were me taking the photo then I'd have gone the right side, dropped the shutter speed to something like 1/100 - 1/200 and panned, maybe with a little flash, but enough ambient light present, and just think at the benefits from the lower ISO you'd need.
FYI - The SB-600 tends to try and render people as being neutral grey. If anything, a dark rider would tend to be overexposed as the flash would increase it's output to make dark blue into neutral grey. I've found that people dressed all in black tend to need FEV of -1.0 or sometimes more or they come out overexposed.
I didn't do it on this pic, as the colourful rider who went before come out fine. It needed a lot of CS2 work to fix the overdone flash:
You can still see some of the excessive flash on the rocks and trail. And this was with FEV -0.7 if memory serves me correctly. It's still not enough:
The opposite goes for light coloured riders with bright backgrounds - they tend to need FEV increased as the flash tries to make white become grey. I know it sounds the wrong way round but trust me on that.
Regarding photoshop - have you tried a contrast USM to reduce the haze? It can sometimes help with things: amount 15-20%, radius 70-80 pixels and threshold 0 (I've just done that in CS2 with your pic and it helps give it a bit of pop).
I'm not sure what PP you did but I'm aware you're pretty good at CS2. If I'm trying to reduce noise I turn off sharpening in camera (or RAW converter), run any NR then use contrast USM as the first sharpening step. If I need any further sharpening then image-> mode-> LAB then smartsharpen only the luminosity channel, taking care to use the fade bit in the shadows tab to reduce noise, and remember to convert back to RGB.
That's a pretty lengthy reply but it's stuff that I've found works for me in those type of tough conditions.
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dandantheadminman
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thnx for the reply hamish yeh i learnt quite a bit from that thnx lol
cheers for all the advice
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