Yesterday, April 6th, I photographed the Santa Cruz Classic Beach Hill Criterium. Despite coming very close to getting a bit of sunburn (yes, I used sunscreen and was wearing a TWiT hat for extra geekiness) I had a great time.
The image at the top of this post is my favorite of the day (click to enlarge). Straight from the camera with no adjustments, just like it should be. Poster sized, it would look really fantastic! For a big print like that I might consider making a few adjustments to lighten her face, but only a little and paying attention to the highlights in the helmet and the white of the shorts.
The image was captured with my Nikon D200 and 80-200f2.8 AFS lens at 175mm (about 260mm effective). The Vanderkitten rider (name unknown) is just coming up to the corner before the wall. I especially like the reflection in her glasses. And I like saying “Vanderkitten.”
Vanderkitten. Vanderkitten. Vanderkitten. Man, that just rolls off the tongue!
This is not the first time I’ve photographed my home town criterium. The experience has led me to know where to find the shots I like best, and since I do this for fun I’m the one that counts! One of those places is the corner at the bottom of the course along the river just before “the wall” that leads up to the start/finish line. The wall is a short power climb that blows up every field (even the pro’s this year) and the last corner is tight, so the field has to slow down more than they do even on the climb itself.
That little climb sucks, by the way. In training it’s nothing, but racing up it is a whole different matter, especially when you have to do it every 2-3 minutes for an hour! Here is a view of the wall from the bottom:
What you cannot see is the false flat that continues all the way to the finish line and really saps your legs just as you think you should be able to catch back on!
This shot also illustrates why I like to get in close shooting cycling. With the mens pro peloton this image would be more interesting, but only because there would be more riders. The wires would still be an eyesore, and if the cloud cover had not been there the sky would have been completely blown out. That is the primary reason I zoom in: to get a good exposure.
Photographers like the morning and evening “golden hours” because the scene brightness range fits our film better. If the darkest darks and the lightest lights are more “stops” apart than your film can handle, something has to change. This is true whether the film is digital, slides or print. My D200 has an exposure latitude of 3EV, as measured by me. If the brightest part of the image and the darkest are more than 3EV apart, the light areas will loose detail and become increasingly white, or the darks will loose detail and be increasingly black.
Here is an example where I used manual spot metering to try and expose for the riders faces. This took several laps to adjust. The effect of trying to expose the faces properly caused the background to fade to black. Notice that his helmet still has over-exposed specular highlights that would have no detail in a print:
Bike racers are also very fond of black and white in the colors of their uniforms and bicycles, so extra care must be taken if you want to make prints that don’t look flat. In this regard, the previous image fails, as the rider is wearing an all black jersey and there is no detail left. Without his right arm in the image, he would be a disembodied head floating in a sea of black! Hmm. That might be an interesting crop.
One way to compensate is to eliminate problem areas from the scene and reduce the scene brightness range. So I zoom in and eliminate the sky. The shot below might be better with some of the open space to the left cropped out, but I thought the line of the chain link fence in the background would be even more distracting that way, so I left it alone. Being a little further out gives more of an impression of movement as well.
The smiling tactic is unnerving, isn’t it? Easton SugarCRM must teach their riders to smile because most of them do it. Sure makes for fun photographs! Again, in a print, I would adjust the exposure around her face to that it would be more visible. But that can be done, while getting detail in the white of her sleeves cannot once it is lost.
