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News – Our best and worst shoots this past month.
Ryu claims not to have had any good shoots, and hated shooting Arsenal v Olympique Marseille in the Champions League. Matt was shooting NFL most of the month which was good, but shot NHL hockey for the first time in several months and had a bit of a hard time getting the timing back.
We introduce… Kurt Rogers
Ryu and Matt interview Kurt Rogers of Think Tank Photo, maker of great bags and accessories for photographers. Kurt tells us about his history as a daily news photographer and his transition into making the bags that you’ll see on sidelines and around the waists of professional photographers everywhere.
Master class
Ryu and Matt talk about techniques and things to keep in mind when shooting in low light.
Training Ground
In Training Ground Training Ground we critique pictures from listeners who bravely ask for it in our Flickr group.
You Win
Our October 2011 themed competition was “None Whatsoever”
The winner is Vanessa Lim from Singapore with this water polo picture:
Second place is Riku Salo at Nivavaara by Jaakko Posti
Third place is snowcross Xtown, Mirabel 2011 by O_Bilodeau
The November themed competition is “Freeze”. Goto our BLFS flickr group page for competition rules. Think Tank has donated a bag for us to give away to our November winner, so make sure to head over to Flickr and enter by November 27th.
Training Ground
Post your images to our flickr group for constructive or destructive critique here.
Special thanks to…
Icon by Arvin Bautista
Audio Production/Editing: David Whittaker
*Please Read Below*
Big Lens Fast Shutter is funded solely from the pockets of Ryu Voelkel and Matt Cohen. If you think the information we give you about sports photography is making you a better sports photographer and as a result a well balanced human being, please show us your appreciation by supporting us on Patreon and send some of your hard earned dollars/euros/Brixton pounds our way. People who donate will be mentioned on our next show unless you want to remain anonymous. Thank you for supporting us and may the force of sports photography be with you, always.
Big Lens Fast Shutter 
Just want to add that Vanessa is our first ever two time winner of “You win”. Congratulations, Vanessa. :)
Thanks Ryu :). Feeling really really motivated to work harder :D.
I enjoyed the new podcast as usual. Thanks for making it. I love Think Tank stuff, so I liked the interview with one of the founders. Very interesting to hear some of the background that goes into their products.
I was curious about Matt’s comments about shooting RAW and noise reduction concerning 3rd party software. I too shoot Nikon, but I guess I’ve never used their software for RAW conversion. I didn’t think any software inherited the camera’s sharpness or noise reduction if the image was shot in RAW and that’s why so much more post-processing is required for RAW files. I use Lightroom to convert my RAW files and I’ve always been very impressed wtih the noise reduction abilities of that software (at least in version 3), so I was surprised to hear Matt say you’ll get better noise reduction using the in-camera noise reduction shooting jpeg. You do lose some dynamic range shooting in jpeg compared to RAW though, so keep that in mind. There are some trade-offs to shooting in jpeg.
Hey guys, It’s Simon here over at thinkTank… Thanks for the inclusion! I’ve just Google+’d you, I’ll tweet you and Facebook you too, before the day is out… :D
—S
An out of focus photoshop composite as runner up I can MAYBE understand.
But an uninteresting, badly cropped, nothing image with a distracting man in high-vis clothing in the background as third place? Come on. What exactly is special about the third pic? More than a dozen other entries are far more deserving.
The credibility of your competitions is taking a big hit.
Ben:
The camer makers are the only ones to have access to their exact camera settings. Third party software makers are basically reverse engineering everything, which is why it takes a while for them to support new bodies.
Aperture and Lightroom (from what I hear) are getting better at their conversions, but I doubt they will ever catch the camera makers.
I didn’t say that shooting jpg was better, just that all else being equal, you will have better noise reduction in third party software if you shoot jpg. if you want to shoot RAW you will get better noise reduction if you use the camera maker software.
Simon: we appreciate that!
Steve: So which picture was yours? Which pictures would you replace 2 and 3 with?
Thanks Matt. I didn’t know that. I knew the camera maker software had more accurate colors, but hadn’t heard anything about noise reduction before.
Matt, I would pick “This Photo Is Currently Unavailable.”
Seriously, I saw that snowmobile jump picture and decided not to even bother. Never saw the guy in the lower corner until Ryu mentioned him. Most of the rest of the shots are action shots plain and simple but that one was either dumb luck or great planning. Either way it looked really good to me. If I had to pick another one, I like the tennis woman with the black background. Of course, I’m not a pro or an editor. However, I do enjoy listening to the podcasts and have submitted photos for November’s contest and training ground. I enjoy listening to you describe why you like pictures, why you think they work and what people could do to improve their pictures. Considering that you’ve never tried to put these off as anything but your opinions I don’t know how anyone can fault you for your choices. I for one will keep coming back for more.
In order:
Vanessa: At this moment, no one has said your photo should not be number 1, so you are still the queen of BLFS. Congratulations once again. :)
Ben: I think Matt said it all. I shoot RAW when my client asks me to do so, but any other time, shooting jpg is better. There I said it. As long as your camera does a good job of doing the noise reduction, you should shoot with jpg. Lighter, easier, and better.
Simon: Thank you, thank you very much.
Steve: Ah, I see where you are coming from. 2nd place photo, we discussed it in length before we recorded “You win”. Is it PS or is it not PS? I did some digging and found out that it most likely wasn’t as he shot series of these shots. We might be completely wrong and if we find out that if it’s a composite, we will take the photo down. As for the 3rd place fiasco, it’s all Matt’s decision. :) Before I throw him under the bus, there is not an exact science to measure who ranks where in our competition. It’s a subjective thing. If that quantifies as us not having any credibility, oh well, c’est la vie.
John: We strive to keep you happy, but sometimes we will upset you with the things we say and the pictures we pick. But we firmly stand with our selection of the photos in “You win”, no matter what anyone says. Well, maybe except when my wife tells us otherwise. :)
Hi Guys,
Your opinion is your opinion which is your opinion. Talk about credibility seems excessive – but as english is not my first language I may be taking it too literally…
In addition to the critique portion, the show itself has nice sections such as the interviews, master classes and the whole production. There is a lot of time and work involved in all of that I do appreciate.
Keep up the good work and I’ll follow your advice – low angles, no distractions and an exciting image (that seems to be the hard part…).
Thanks Phranco. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and sometimes we will go against the grain (English: against popular opinion), but we take pride in it. :)
Exciting image…. Yup, not an easy thing to do.
Ryu