Hi Neil,
Rodeo photography can be really interesting and challenging. Unlike most other sports, which usually have a linear progression to them, rodeo is perhaps the one sport where as soon as the gate opens almost anything can happen. The rider and the photographer are both at the whim of a rather angry animal, which is why it is such a challenge to photograph.
As a capture, this particular image looks like a reasonable moment although I do have a couple of considerations. To begin with, the cropping is a bit too tight; I really would like to see more of the bull’s legs. This bull could be kneeling on the ground and we would not know. Ideally I like to crop in camera but with sports like this it does help to give yourself about 10% around the image. In cropping the image you could then also make sure that the verticals accurate (if you look in the back of the picture you can see the posts are falling off to the left).
The other thing that I would like to see, and this might seem pedantic, are the rider’s eyes. This is all a matter of timing and in rodeo photography you often need to take what you can get. In this instance though, I would be using your cameras 8-frames-per-second motor-drive to try and capture that fraction of a moment when everything in the image is working properly.
Worth noting is that you do not need to shoot continuously with the motor-drive… short bursts are all that is needed to help your chances of getting a magical photo.
Now, I know that one of the adjustments that you
deliberately added to this image is the lighter vignette to give the photo a vintage
look.
As a rule, most vignettes are usually darker… part of the reason for this is
that most lenses naturally create a darker vignette anyway, it is a natural
fact of their design. A lot of photographers also add a darker vignette in
postproduction just for the sake of keeping a viewer’s eyes in the central area
of the picture.
In days gone by though, many portrait photographers
would add a lighter vignette to photograph. The technique was a rather romantic
way of disassociating a subject from a background and while it was popular for
many years it eventually lost. The last time that I saw photographers adding a
light vignette to a photograph was in the early 1980s; that coincides with the
time that black-and-white photography really did start losing ground to colour
photography.
If I was going to add a vintage feel to this photograph I would not only add
the light vignette but I would also convert the image to black-and-white.
I hope you get a lot more use out of your 70-200mm f2.8; it is a great lens to
own.
Cheers, Anthony.
Image Doctor's edited version
