We are now well into the cycle race season. This one was taken during my first visit of the season to the amateur cycle racing which takes place on the local circuit of Goodwood Motor Race Circuit. They hold these on Tuesday evenings which makes for some beautiful light and colours if the weather plays ball. I took a lot of pictures but the effort on this riders face really demanded some special treatment.

I used the event to give a first try out of my new 75-300 second hand Minolta lens bought for £60 on Ebay. One big advantage of Sony is that the Auto Focus motor is in the Camera not the lens like Canon and Nikon. This gives the advantage of cheaper lenses and useable old film lenses. The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Minolta 75-300mm zoom at 300mm

The image was first edited in RAW. I next cloned out an ugly bright white shed in the background. Further adjustments were made using Topaz DeNoise. Next the image was adjusted in Topaz lens effects to add a zoom blur. The zoom centre was fixed on the cyclists face. The effect was applied on a duplicate layer and a layer mask. A brush was then used to exclude more of the cyclist. The big advantage of a layer mask is the ability to precisely control how much of the effect to apply to each part of the picture by using a brush on the mask with different opacity. For example the background cyclists were originally not visible through the zoom effect. A brush at about 12% opacity was used to remove enough of the zoom to allow their shapes to appear without distracting too much from the main cyclist.