Throwback Photo
It has been a long time since I have seen Supercross in person. This picture was taken in 2000 during my last trip to see boys race. The year before we pulled the double watching the series in both Indy and Detroit in two domes that no longer exist. That is why I like taking pictures so much. Things change so quickly that you have a record of what was once there. The RCA Dome has been gone for a while now. I only saw high school football in the dome, but I did see a lot of motor racing events in there. I am excited to see Supercross in person again. The names have changed, but the racing is still just as crazy to me as it was the first time that I saw it. These guys are true daredevils. The crazy thing is that I don’t think that they realize it.
Technical Data
This picture was made with my old Sony Mavica. This camera was well ahead of its time. It was the first camera that allowed me to see just what you could do with a good camera in your hands. The only downside of the camera was that as with most point and shoots it was very poor in low light. I was probably in the automatic mode to begin with, but I rarely took a good picture in low light. Taking pictures of Supercross was no different. I went through all of the pictures that at the time I thought were great only to see that they really were all just blurry. You could pick out a couple of spots that are in focus and clear, but most of the shot looked bad. During this event they had a photo contest for the fans. Of course I thought that I was going to win, but I suppose they were not looking for out of focus, blurry pictures.
Besides the camera I would like to talk about what I did to process this photo in Lightroom. I used a Matt Kloskowski preset called light HDR look to get started. From there I tried to walk the fine line between making an old jpeg look better, and totally ruining it. That involves moving sliders to see what they do to the image. For an old jpeg I think this is not a bad shot. Hopefully I can get some of my new gear in the stadium this weekend to see how much I have improved over time.
Dave Wegiel Photography 