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Photoshop daughter jumping on ATV...please!!


J

Jasfarrar

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Would love if someone could take out the rider on the bottom pic and replace the rider with my daughter on her atv. Would like her and the quad she is riding to be a little sideways, like she is whipping it, just like he is in the bottom pic. If someone could do this, it would mean a lot. Thanks!!!!
image.jpg
image.jpg
 
Bugger. I put the clipping line in the wrong place for the right front wheel and the young lady's leg. I'll fix it later.
 
It does look a bit too good to be true - maybe because the IQ of quad bike is so much better than the background, but it might just be down to a shallow depth of field. Sometimes things do look too goo to be true. This was taken at altitude in crystal clear mountain air, and the lads are so sharp they look like they were composited - they weren't. This happens every time the Kiwi Experience bus - which travels New Zealand with young tourists - comes to Nelson Lakes. The tour guide eggs them on to jump off the jetty, but that water is cold! To give these lads their due, they made a great job of toughing it out, but only so they could fool some of the females to take the plunge. The air was as blue with some very unladylike words. I have some shots of the girls, but they were not the kindest of pictures so I never put them on line. :-) BTW I once entered this shot in a competition, but I was so concerned it would be judged as fake, I included the full 14 shot sequence (10fps with my 1D4) by way of a film strips above and below the main picture.

Jetty Jumpers.jpg
 
Trevor, in both the stock ATV shot and in yours, I suspect that both used a fill flash located near the camera to brighten the subjects. This can cause people to worry that both might be composites because of the disparity in lighting, ie, direction (and its effect on shadows), its color temp and saturation of the flesh tones, and simply the relative intensity (eg, why should the kids in you shot be so much brighter than the mountains or the water). These days, when people see something like this, their 1st thought is that it might have been 'shopped. They usually don't consider the possibility that a fill flash was used.

Another aspect of your image that may cause people to think it's a composite is the sharpness of the kids - you completely stopped their movement. My guess is that you used a higher shutter speed (well under 1/1000 sec) than most people with little P&S cameras are used to seeing. Couple this with a wide aperture to throw the mountains OOF, and the net effect can seem odd to viewers who don't analyze it carefully.

In the case of the ATV shot, it still might be a composite, but look carefully and you'll see a bit of rotation blur in the drive wheels, which at least suggests that if it is a composite, at least the ATV was actually doing something, not just stationary in the studio. LOL.

Tom
 
TD said:
I was so concerned it would be judged as fake, I included the full 14 shot sequence (10fps with my 1D4) by way of a film strips above and below the main picture.
Click to expand...
These would've been needed to convince me it was not a composite.
 
Inkz said:
The original looks photoshopped lol...

Something about it doesn't sit right lol. Maybe I need coffee :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Hope the coffee was good! But I think you may be right. The contrast of the biker looks a bit fake compared to the BG, but that my be the haziness of the trees. Hmmm. The biker also looks a bit jagged. I couldn't enlarge it enough without going into PS. But I suppose that's irrelevant to the job at hand, lol.
 
Tom, don't give fill flash away...... More fun letting "experts" argue.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Regards the jetty jumpers, I just checked and it was taken at f2.8 @ 1/6400 and ISO200. The low ISO would have been to let me use f2.8 without running out of headroom with the maximum 1/8000 shutter speed of the camera. While I almost never work without a flash, even when carrying two cameras, in this case the lads would have been out of range, and the flash couldn't have kept up with the 14 frames I took at 10fps. So it was just the bright tones of their skin contrasted against the dark water. Regards the quad bike original, I suspect there might have been some on-axis flash, but if it was a composite, it was an awesome job with the selection. Take a look at those tiny spaces through the underside of the quad.
 
This is now officially a very boring and to be honest extremely tiresome to read, good day to you all.
 
Hi Trevor -

The lighting in your "jetty jumpers" image is really interesting. When I first saw this wonderful image and was considering the possibility that fill flash was used, I thought about exactly the same problem that you mentioned, ie, getting enough flash intensity to have any significant effect in daylight. I've fought the same battle myself, many times. LOL.

I then thought about the direction of the primary source of light on the boys. It's clear that whatever is lighting these foreground objects is not a diffuse source (ie, clouds), and must be located either very near the camera or directly above it (ie, not in front of the boys, not to either side, and not very close to vertical). This is because there are no shadows cast by either the left or right poles on the jetty, and because the shadowing on the boys bodies is only at the very edges of their bodies and is about the same on both sides of their bodies. The shadowing cast by the swim trunks on the legs of the 3rd boy from the left is probably the most definitive source of info on the lighting and suggests that the light source is a good bit above the camera, reinforcing your statement that the sun is the main light source, not a flash.

However, I'm still puzzled by two things. The first is that the EXIF data for you image says that a flash was indeed fired.

EXIF_data_screen_shot.jpg

The second is why is everything in the foreground so much brighter than the mountains? If the sun is the primary source of light for both, the reflectivity of the weathered wood on the dock is not that different from the reflectivity of the trees covering the closer mountains, so both should be about equal brightness, yet the mountains are so much darker than the foreground objects. Did you selectively either brighten the foreground or darken the background?

Cheers,

Tom

PS - Sorry if this bores you, Paul, but, nerd that I am, this sort of analysis and discussion absolutely fascinates me. ;-)
 
I found another photo from what appears to be the same location and with the sun in a very similar position (eg, mid-day),

http://dockjumping.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/3600410928_51a66d3a3b_b.jpg

and it has almost the same lighting (eg, bright foreground, darker mountains) as yours.

What a beautiful location!

So I guess my nerd curiosity comes down to the question of why are the trees on the mountains in the background of both shots so very dark when they are lit by the same light (ie, from directly above the photographer in both pix) as the foreground?

T
 
At the risk of sending Paul to sleep, the jetty is pointing almost exactly due south and the EXIF says my picture was taken a 12.04. There are some shadows on the right hand posts, which put the sun behind me and slightly to my right. I almost never work outside without a flash, because it can so bright here. With f2.8 and ISO200 I'd recon to get about six meters of useful fill range, but not at 10fps. You can see the whole sequence here The EXIF also says it was taken in July, which is mid winter for us, so the sun was low, even at midday. That means that if the water and mountains were under cloud cover, you wouldn't be able to see those clouds because they would be above and behind the camera.

This is the same jetty in 2007

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7618564@N08/5345762956/in/photolist-99or5Q-a4mZat-95AWdW

This happens almost every time the green Kiwi Experience bus comes to the lake.
 
Thanks for the explanation, Trevor. I'm such a nerd, I actually saw the mid-day time and mid-winter date in the EXIF data and then, after my last post, pulled up info on the area (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/52070442) and came to the same conclusion as your explanation.

Before you mentioned how popular this area is, I was surprised by the large number of photos I could on the web of the exactly the same location. This leads me back to my favorite existential question of whether it's worthwhile to take scenery snapshots anymore (eg, while on vacation) since you can find photos of virtually every overlook and tourist spot known to man. These days, I either do pix that aren't going to happen again (eg, with people), or really good scenics that aren't likely to be shot by every passing tourist.

T
 
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