Cycling photos

Eric Reagan is a photographer in Knoxville, Tennessee who likes to ride. He's a cyclist who likes to shoot. Eric recently started a blog featuring some of his cycling photos.

For those of you who want to take good cycling photos, take a good look at Eric's cycling photos and look for these features.

• f-stop: Eric opens up the f-stop of his lenses so that only his subject is in focus. Putting the extraneous clutter out-of-focus is called shallow depth-of-field. If you have a fully automatic dumbed-down camera, putting the camera in "portrait" mode is the way you can get closest to a halfway decent DOF. Doing it right takes expensive lenses. Eric mostly uses a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 lens. His fastest lens is a Canon EF 50 f/1.8. DOF is the difference between a "Wow" and a hohum photo.
  
• Faces: One of my gripes about cycling photos on Flickr are butt shots. Eric does have a butt shot, but the others are all face shots. You can't tell if a butt is grimacing with effort or happy with exhilaration.
  
• Framing: Unless you're copying Graham Watson's shot of the peloton riding through a field of sunflowers, try to fill your frame with one interesting subject. Tight groups can be interesting because they have the appearance of a single subject; a spread out group in a large field is almost never interesting unless theres's something that visually unifies them. Think consciously about where your eye is leading you when you observe a field, zoom in, shoot and take that amazing shot.

If you're a photographer please feel free to contribute more helpful tips for newbies like me.

Tags: photography, cycling, blog