Byron Servies

Bzzzt. Kracle …

Hello? Hello? Does this still work?

Hmm. What does this knob do?

snap!

This past weekend I drove to Madera to photograph the criterium stage for the Madera County Stage Race. Having received 100,000 hits on my Santa Cruz criterium photographs, I thought it would be fun, and it was. I thought I had sunburned my knees (kneeling down to get a better angle rubs off suncreen), but that turned out not to be the case.

Photographically, this was a much more challenging environment than Santa Cruz. Not only was it nearly 100F degrees out, there was not a cloud in the sky or flat background on the course. I tried a number of things, but the photographs are problematic.

The sky around the rider should be a nice pale blue, but to expose for the rider the sky just had to go and be all white. Notice the shadow on the riders face, caused by the rider himself! The blob on the left is a trailer, which littered this industrial course. The UCLA team was fun to talk to, and I stayed for their race just to photograph them.

I often find it useful to concentrate on a single rider or team. The racers go by very quickly and trying to get more than 1 shot per lap is nearly futile. Being patient, finding a rider/team you recognize in the viewfinder and then panning on them works better for me. If there is a breakaway or a rider off the back, they can get more shots, like this fellow:

This was about the best location, but I like to move around and couldn’t stay here all day.

After receiving so much interest last time, I finally decided that I could at last make use of the Creative Commons licensing I had read so much about. I’m not going to make a lot of money on these shots (when I say “a lot of interest”, that is decidedly relative), so I decided to embed this license in the photographs:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License

Prints from smugmug are reasonable, and digital rights are taken care of by this license. Me, I use smugmug to serve the links as well so my bandwidth limits are not impacted, but if you want to download a shot of yourself, please go right ahead.

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.

Earlier today I was asked what the MotivatedTurnip was and why is he riding again? There is a cake in the oven, so I have a few minutes and a shiny new blog in which to post the story!

The tale begins in 2000 with a bunch of bored engineers sitting around a conference table describing how unmotivated we were. Things were bad. We were seriously unmotivated. That is probably what the meeting was about, though I have no memory of the agenda. I do recall saying something like “I have the motivation of a turnip,” and everyone laughed. Not long after that, our team decided to use AIM IM as a notifier. I had to create an account, my name was taken, and the MotivatedTurnip was born.

The handle made me laugh, and it was quirky, so I kept it. It googles well, too. Having it in the blog keeps that going.

I added “rides again” because I used to have a Sun Microsystems blog called MotivatedTurnip. I still work for Sun, but I rarely posted. Even though I work on Linux, none of my projects are open source and all are pre-release. Can’t blog about that.

Not wanting to use a corporate blog for personal posts, I deleted it after a year and a small handful of updates to move here to my family site where I decided to just use my real name. That may ultimately turn out to be a mistake, but I’m not trying to hide so why not?

I have finally taken the plunge and installed wordpress on my own web site. My goal is to start a blog for myself and explore many of the new technologies that are available on the internet now.

In 24 hours there has already been an update to the wordpress software offered by my web hosting company Cruzio and I have just begun to explore all of the options available. No sense in sticking with the old version just hours after creating the site, so I will do the update today while I continue to explore what I want to do.

So, for a while, it’s default theme city for me. Laugh away.