...Or you can just scroll down!
I'm hoping this set shows the additional effort I'm putting into pushing the quality up higher. In particular, the cropping, white balance, and sharpening have gotten more attention than in the past, where the entire batch was given to Imagemagick with a single set of parameters and nature took it's due course.
It's clear the camera's being flogged pretty hard when close cropped versions are examined, and the sharpening and white balance fixes just make it worse, and mottling of dark colors becomes pretty obvious... the tones in the shadows under the rim of helmets all look a little off.
I noticed I'm dutching the camera at times. generally to bring the horizontal axis parallel to the skaters attack angle with the ground, but other times completely arbitrarily. Part of this is likely that the depth compression at long focal lengths makes finding true horizontal hard, part of it is trying to make the skater look right in the frame, thereby making the crowd look funny, and part of it is just my own laziness and hurry to mash the shutter button.
