Bike riding in July in Canberra is not for the softies and yet again frost and fog played its part. Friday was the worst - it ended up the coldest, greyest day this year and whilst grey skies at midday are fine for portraits, fine art and landscape they're a bit of a let down for sports photography when chasing contrast, colour and movement.
So, the solution? shed some artificial light on things of course.
As is my normal practice I did a bit of recce of the course before the start, contemplating some scenery and imagining the results with a bit of extra light added in. Luckily, there are at least three locations on Uriarra Road where the road is elevated enough to ensure a backdrop that falls away from the road yet keeps the distant hills sufficiently in shot to give a nice 'feel' to the result.
The following photo of Bec Doolan on her way to 3rd place in the Women's grading is a bit like what I was after.
By adding slightly-diffused fill flash where the setting sun would normally be gives it a bit of a 'studio' look - just about right. And shooting at 1/250s is fast enough to give a reasonably sharp result without straining the flash too hard. Now, how to setup the fill light to make the most of the soft ambient light? It makes sense when it's really dark to relinquish control of ambient light and instead commit to flash. These pics make the point fairly well I think since now the flash is dominant and needs to handled with a bit of care - something I don't profess to be an expert at by a long shot.
The first few shots looked okay but colour saturation was a bit flat so I pumped up the saturation in-camera, dropped the ambient a little (closed down from f/4.5 to f/5.6) to get the riders to jump off the page a bit more and wound up the flash by a third (1/3 EV) - that should do the trick!.
Inevitably it's easy in the heat of the moment - like when you can hear the next competitor only seconds away - to over-correct things and get a bit of blow-out - just like this shot of Sinead Noonan.
At the time I thought it looked a bit too "studio", but looking at it now on a colour and ambient-corrected monitor it looks fine.
Not so this shot of Cameron Parlevliet - I absolutely 'nuked' this shot with off-camera flash - it's a wonder he didn't yelp when I pressed the trigger!
Fortunately for me it was raining and this shot makes like I meant to show that he and all the other riders were soaked! Just lucky I guess because when I first saw this and a couple of other shots in the same sequence that were equally overblown I was none too pleased.Then on second and third viewing I thought, well, they're different! And now they help to emphasize my point - it's tricky trying to make studio portraits, in the rain, in 6 degrees, lying in mud on the side of the road. But if these guys want to suffer for their 'art' then that's reason enough for me to do so too.
bfn
Greg
