London 2012 Bradley Wiggins Golden Ride Final

The Olympic Mens and Womens Individual  Cycling Time Trial were held last Wednesday 1 August starting and finishing at Hampton Court  Palace SW London. Getting there was just a 2 hours by train so going there was a given.

I checked out the route on Street view and found a quiet fairly narrow suburban street with a green park as a background. This was far enough away from Hampton Court to avoid massive crowds and waving flags and cameras getting in the way of pictures.

My Union Jack was put on the railing and was accompanied by more as others arrived. The crowd here was about one deep as opposed to 6 deep on many other parts of the Course.

Home favourite Bradley Wiggins (Wiggo) was the clear winner with his teamate Chris Froome taking the Bronze.

This picture is my favourite enhanced with some HDR work and added pan blur in editing.. The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 28-200 zoom at 28mm. I used ISO 800 to gain a high shutter speed of 1/800^th second. The image was opened in Camera Raw and 3 additional images were created at +2EV and -2Ev and -4EV for a “false HDR” with each image having Noiseware Pro applied.  A Photoshop action I had saved was used to create the extra images automatically. The images were saved as tiffs.  

The HDR was created using Photmatix. In Photoshop a pan blur was applied using Topaz lens effects. A layer mask was used to remove the blur from Bradley to make him stand out. This involved a lot of fine detail level brush work on the layer mask. To get accurate  for the complex area behind bike and rider I used a number of selection areas using the pen tool to confine the brush to particular areas when bringing in the blur. The white streakes behind the bike a happy accident? No Way! They were painted in with a white brush before adding the blur.

Photomatix

Outputted in Photomatix to detail enhancer. Click the Camera name top right on flickr for this image for Exif details and the settings used.

Photoshop

The first step was to select just the front wheel and add a radial spin blur in Photoshop to give an accurate movement look. A pan blur was applied using Topaz lens effects. A layer mask was used to remove the blur from the cyclist to make him stand out. This involved a lot of fine detail level brush work on the layer mask.

Topaz Adjust, Vibrance clarity preset.

Levels and curves to enhance.

Hue saturation greens used to reduce green saturation for a more natural look.

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

Duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and standard sharpening with Unsharp mask

Some of the other images were brought in and excluded with layer masks. They were then brought back in some areas to tidy up and remove some over bright areas.

A crop was made for better composition.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Below are the Before and After images. First the original image. Then the tonemapped image and then the final result after pan blur and adjustments.

Original at 0EV

London 2012 Bradley Wiggins Golden Ride Original

Tonemapped image Detail Enhancer

London 2012 Bradley Wiggins Golden Ride Tonemapped

Final Image

London 2012 Bradley Wiggins Golden Ride Final

Edwin Jones