I had a blast shooting the Summer Showdown mountain bike race at Bear Creek this weekend. Not only were the riders doing a great job on a tough course, but I was really hitting my stride with Strobist sports lighting. It’s been a nice evolution from basic motion freeze with a manual flash at the Rally in the Valley, to ETTL flash and some motion effects at On the Rocks, to off-camera flash with gels, motion, and multiple positions at Bear Creek.
From other biking photos and my own riding, I knew I wanted a low flash to get in under visors on tilted helmets, and that the sun high in the trees would provide a bit of backlight. That meant putting the main flash on a light stand about 3 feet tall, angled up towards the rider and into the trail from the side opposite the sun. Putting it near a big rock or tree made me more confident no one would clip it or crash into it. I had hoped to use a second low flash to augment the backlight from the sun side, but had trouble with the second radio trigger.
One light worked quite, well, though, as long as the rider was back far enough to be fully lit. A good tip I picked up for figuring out this position is to stand in the place of the subject and make sure you can see the flash straight-on. The light stand was key for positioning; for all the trees in the forest, none were quite where I wanted them, and the Manfrotto 001B 6-Feet Nano Stand is light enough to backpack.
Setting the ambient was straight forward: 1/200 to freeze motion and a 400 ISO got me to about f5.6, providing some wiggle room in either direction. That made it easy to adjust to 1/60 for a bit of motion blur without having to change the light. After the first couple of riders, I got the flash set to about 1/16 for a 3 foot distance, hoping to minimize the distraction for the racers. Warming up the flash provided a more natural look for some of the photos; 1/2 CTO turned out to be the right amount.
Having a variety of camera positions picked out was a good start, and I found a few more as I went. Being on a significant slope was a big boost for getting dramatically high and low angles without extra gear or awkward positions. I also realized I read one too many Olympic blogs about remote cameras when I started picking which positions I would remote - despite having only one camera!
Being a local race, there was a nice bit of thrill to stand right next to or practically underneath bikers flying by needing no more than a 50mm lens (on a 1.6 crop camera). Moving further down the trail, a 70-200mm allowed for more head-on photos. Ergonomically, I didn’t do my body any favors scrambling over the rocks all day, but switching from landscape to portrait and using the vertical battery grip kept my hand from cramping up, and produced a nice variety of shots at different angles.
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