London 2012 Velo Action Final

I was at the Velodrome on the 1^st September for the morning session. This included a Gold Medal win for GB riders  Neil Fachie and Barney Storey in the Kilometre Tandem trial. The rider in the picture is John – Allan Butterworth in the Qualifying Heats for the C5 category Pursuit. During this ride he broke the World Record though minutes later his new record was broken again by the Australian Michael Gallagher. The 2 went on to ride in the afternoon for the Gold/ Silver final and John-Allan won the silver. He lost his left arm in Iraq in 2007 and took up Para Cycling as part of rehabilitation.

My seat was a cheap one up in the rafters but as I was free to walk around I got this shot from near the track.

This picture is enhanced with some HDR work and added pan blur in editing. The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A550 with a Sigma 28-200 zoom at 90mm. I used ISO 1600 to gain a high shutter speed of 1/400^h second. The image was opened in Camera Raw and 2 additional images were created at +2EV and -2Ev 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.  

Photomatix

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

Photoshop

Topaz Adjust, Vibrance detail 2 preset.

Levels were used to enhance.

Slight increase in Vibrance

Layers flattened before going on to sharpening.

Duplicate layer Noiseware Pro and standard sharpening with Unsharp mask

Second duplicate layer with mask to apply extra sharpening and contrast with low amount and high radius using Unsharp mask (Clarity Effect) The settings were 35 amount and 35 radius.

A pan blur was applied using Topaz lens effects. The angle of the blur was changed to match the angle of the picture. A layer mask was used to remove the blur from John-Allan and his bike 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.

A crop was used for better composition.

Cloning was done to remove a distracting railing from the bottom left corner.

BEFORE AND AFTER

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

Original at 0EV

London 2012 Velo Action Original

Fused  image

London 2012 Velo Action Fused

Final Image

London 2012 Velo Action Final

Edwin Jones