BMX at Venice Beach Today

Shot some photos of the BMX competition today at Venice Beach.  Pretty amazing what they can do on bikes and skateboards.

As always, click on the photo to see it larger (at least I think that is how it works, LOL).
The first four photos were exposed for the sky, using the cameras aperture priority mode.  Then onto Lightroom to lighten up the riders (flyers).  The one drawback with the FZ30 by Panasonic is the noise levels in shadows, which you can see in the full size image.  The bottom two photos were shot in manual mode, exposed for the riders - much less noise in the riders, but the sky is pretty blown out.  To get the best of both worlds, if I had shot in raw with my Canon, then processed as 3 or 4 different exposures and used HDR, could have compensated for the extreme contrast levels.  One day I will have to experiment with that.

These last 3 shots were just a few others I shot yesterday and today.

Hope you enjoy and have a great weekend.