swarbrick.com - the blog

The final stretch

There are two days of competition left, but a prior commitment means that I have to leave tonight. There are only four more hours to go.

Despite the long - and strange - hours, time seems to have gone really quickly. My initial excitement at being able to post photos almost as I took them faded somewhat as the schedule got more relentless and the time between taking photos was filled with taking more photos.

So I settled into a sort of routine - arrive an hour before the start of the event and set up. Fire up the laptop and plug in the card reader; put lenses on camera bodies; set up the file names and the image comments on each body so that I'll have some chance of figuring out what I'd taken if I need to. Grab some more water...

It's hot in the velodrome. Very, very hot. The combination of that and carrying two camera bodies with fast - i.e. heavy - lenses on means that this is actually quite tough physical work.

It has been challenging photographically, too. I'm occasionally asked to take portrait or group shots and I often joke that I'd find it easier if the subjects could run towards me at 70 km/h, but I do find it much easier to take good action shots than even passable portraits. But I've had a bit of practice this week - what with podiums and presentations and interviews to cover.

The good thing about shooting in the velodrome is that the lighting is pretty constant. It's always dreadful, but it is pretty stable. There's some natural light during the day, but it doesn't add a huge amount to the floods that illuminate the track. That means I can shoot in manual - switching between a fast shutter speed and mid-range aperture (which opens up slightly as the natural light fades but typically around 1/640 and f6.4) and a slow shutter - 1/50 or 1/100 - and apertures down to f11 to get a bit of motion blur. The D3's excellent auto ISO feature takes care of the slight variations in light from shot to shot. The lights are fluorescent, so the white balance varies a little at higher shutter speeds, but it's not a major issue.

Lens length is, though. I rarely needed anything over 300mm and 200mm was more than enough for 90% of the shots. But with events like match sprinting and bunch races you need to go much wider - 24mm often wasn't enough to get two sprinters in the same shot. So - having concluded that the D200 wasn't really up to the job - I spent a lot of time switching between the 24-70 and the 70-200 zooms. Something like a 20-150mm would be ideal for velodrome work, if anyone's listening.

I took some shots with my cheap(ish) and cheerful 85mm f1.8, too.  On the D200 I only ever used it as a portrait lens because the focus was too slow. On the D3 it's a cracker of a lens and incredibly sharp from about f5.6. It's not too bad at f1.8, either and does give the option of shooting without flash - although you do have to watch the depth of field (or lack thereof...).

85mm f8 85mm f1.8 no flash

Unanswered questions at the moment -

• What do I do with the 3000 shots I've taken that haven't been used in the ProTour News articles? Stock library  pre-Beijing? Framed artwork for cycling fans?
• Should I nick the UCI Photo bib and use it at Reading Track League  on a Monday night?
• Will I know what to do between 10pm and 2am when I get home?
• When will my shoulders stop acheing?
• What the hell is LiveView for?
• What proportion of my life have I spent charging batteries?

The aftermath of Day 1

Well, that was an experience! Not having the trackside pass wasn't a major problem for most of the events - although getting decent pictures of the Scratch and Team Sprints from the wrong side of the barrier on the inside of the fence - with a crowd of photographers on the right side of the fence between you and the action was a challenge.

The media centre is a strange place. It's a mixture of writers, photographers and TV crews ('talent', camera operators, sound recordists, technicians, bag carriers, bag carriers' bag carriers - no wonder TV is so expensive to produce), as well as team and manufacturer PR people. What's strange to me - as a track cycling fan who just happens to be a photographer - is that nobody seems vaguely interested in the racing!

The TV crews are there for the odd interview with their own national riders - they're all taking the UCI's feed for the racing - and the journalists sit their hunched over their laptops writing something - their memoirs? Expense claims? - and occasionally glance up at the TV screens to watch the coverage. I know many of them are features writers, but it looks like they could do most of what they do with the TV coverage and a couple of phone interviews.

The photographers are a mixed bunch, too. Most are agency photographers whose coverage guarantees them apron access even though some have never been to a velodrome before. But a lot are real track racing enthusiasts, here on behalf of national federations and a huge number of cycling related websites.

I found the second session hard. It was relentless - race after race after victory ceremony after race. And, of course, the Opening Ceremony. The extremely athletic young ladies who scaled the heights of the velodrome roofspace wrapped in ribbons did so wrapped in ribbons that were in the colours of the UCI World Champion's rainbow stripes. There was no other connection to cycling that I could see.

No time to copy pictures to the laptop, let alone select the best ones. That's where the agencies and the mass market press guys have the advantage, of course - they're not trying to cover the event, just the winners of the big events. The pictures that will sell. They can take a few shots and then send them off to the agency and let them worry about them.

So, as you can see, the journalists have an easy life and the photographers have an easy life, but what about us photojournalists? Well, when the racing finished at 9.30 I copied my pictures to the laptop, noting a couple that looked usable as they transferred. I then packed up my stuff and heading to the hotel - via a McDonalds drive-thru (I have to keep my figure) - and set up shop in my room.

The report was done by 1am - thanks to the photos as a memory jogger and the excellent Tissot timing service - and I'd selected, tweaked and resized the photos to go with it by 2am, before grabbing 6 hours sleep before I sorted the bulk of the pics this morning.

Waking up at 8am to discover that the report had got through but the pictures had bounced (over the mailbox size limit...), so I re-sent those and started to pack up for Day 2. More pursuits today - so I need to find even more ways to describe multiple time trial heats - but hopefully I've got that bit off fluff on the sensor that only shows up in the 1/30, f11 panning shots...

Oh, and the first report and pictures are now up on ProTour News.

First session over

The first session of the World Track Championships in Manchester is now over, with Bradley Wiggins of Great Britain and Jenning Huizenga of the Netherlands taking their place in the Gold and Silver medal final in the last heat of the afternoon's qualification session. Huizenga starts as slight favourite having won his heat with a time of 4:16.343, just ahead of Wiggins who clocked a respectable 4:17.024.

The Bronze medal ride-off will be between Alexei Markov of Russia and Hayden Roulston of New Zealand.

None of them, though, can match Uzbekistan's Vadim Shaekhov, who had the honour of being the first competitor to take to the track in this year's championship - or the ignomony of  Robert Bengsch who become the first rider to be disqualified - for drafting, having been passed in his heat.

The meda center is abuzz now. I'm sitting opposite a Dutch TV crew who are frantically dubbing commentary on to their highlights package, amid the clatter of laptop keyboards.

It's not all glamour, though. The lime green bib isn't fetching and, while the water's free, coffee's £1 a pop. I'm going to be bankrupt by the end of the week!

Welcome to the World Track Championships

It's Manchester and... it's raining. Not that I care, because I'm writing this from the media centre at the National Velodrome and it's as warm as I'd want it.

I'll be covering the World Track Cycling Championships all week on behalf of Protour News but I'm also going to try to give a flavour of life in the press centre on the blog - and post some pictures into my flickr account.

This is the biggest event I've covered so far, so I'm finding my feet a little, but hopefully I can share a little insight into life on the inside of the fence.

And I will be inside the fence. There are only 12 track side bibs available and they've pretty much been allocated to the big agencies. So the only real advantages I have over the general public in photograpic terms are being able to get to the track centre and having access to the athletes in the warm-up area. Well, that and power and a fast ethernet connection and...

OK. 30 minutes to go until the first event. Better go and get set up!

Explore - Flickr's least explicable

One of the most intriguing things about Flickr is the concept of 'interestingness' - an arcane formula based on, among other things, the number of times a photo has been viewed, the number of groups it has been added to, the number of external-to-flickr links and the speed at which these and other statistics have been clocked up.
Discussions about how the algorithm is constructed are endless and, so far, fruitless. But at any given time, the top rated 200 photographs posted each day are displayed on the Explore page.
Some flickr members have never hit the Explore page; some are there almost every day. Some people are pleasantly surprised to find comments from people who stumbled across their work on the Explore page; others work tirelessly to try to second guess the formula and maximise the number of photos in this not-so-exclusive club.
A number of third party tools exist to allow you to check how many photos you currently have in Explore - the rankings are dynamic, so you can mysteriously appear (or, more likely, disappear) months after your photo was posted. I have contacts with 40 or more Explore photos. My peak so far is a feeble 10 - though a couple have occupied the coveted Number 1 spot, albeit briefly - and my average more like 8.
To give me an excuse to write something in the blog, I've decided to share a little about the background of those that have appeared there - and those that have stuck around.
The first is unique among my pictures by virtue of having appeared no less than 3 times in different forms and of having spent a respectable amount of time at Number 1 in its original form.
It was one of a batch of pictures I took on the walk between Gray's of Westminster and my office in Battersea the day the D200 was launched.
The first version - uploaded within half an hour or so of being taken, along with 50 or so 'snaps' and test shots - attracted a fair amount of attention (as did all the others) from soon-to-be and prospective D200 owners.
It was a couple of days later, though - when I ran it through Nikon Capture and uploaded a warmer, better exposed and slightly cropped version - that it really took off.
Undoubtedly people were still stumbling across it in their unquenchable desire to find any D200 images anywhere on the web. But the comments suggest it had at least some merit in its own right.
I didn't really do much to it - lifted the exposure over all and the shadows a little more; warmed the colour temperature a little and toned down the glare from a truck's tail lights. Subsequent versions have had different crops and there has been a black and white version. Most have been well received and several have made the Explore page, but none have come close to the original.
Over the last 18 months I've returned to that area of the Embankment several times to capture the converging perspective of the trees and street lamps at differnt times of the year and at different times of the day but nothing else has come close to that first winter sunset.
And now the office has moved West - away from the river - so I'll have to find inspiration elsewhere.

Timelapse experiment

  Timelapse experiment 
  Originally uploaded by GuySwarbrick.

Testing, testing, testing...

Now that's interesting...

Having not posted anything for a very, very long time - mostly, in my defence, because I've been too busy taking photos - I decided I needed both an excuse and a mechanism to revive the blog.

The mechanism came first - this was written using TypePad Mobile on my Palm Treo 650 - so all I really needed was an excuse.

Until I get a better one, I'm going to pick some of the pictures that are most highly rated by flickr's controversial Interestingness algorithm and tell the story behind the short. What made me take it? Was it what I intended? What were the camera settings - and why?

We'll start not with the most 'interesting' but with the first photo I took that made Number 1 on flickr's daily Explore page - however briefly!

It was taken last November - the day I collected my D200 from Gray's (and shortly after I dropped it - see the earlier post).

I was really just trying to get the hang of the camera and had been experimenting with very high ISO settings. It was late in the afternoon, mid-December and I was walking down London's Embankment towards Albert Bridge.

I'd just taken a shot of the sun setting over the Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park on the opposite bank of the Thames when I turned back towards where I'd parked the car.

The line of lamps and trees lining my route and Albert Bridge in the distance had a certain appeal, with the post-Buncefield sunset casting a warm glow over everything.

I took a couple of shots - playing with the perspective - and contnued my walk.

It wasn't until I got home and converted the RAW file with Nikon Capture that it really came together, though. D-lighting to lift the shadows and a little extra warming up helped a lot - as did a later crop and the removal of a very bright truck tail light, both at the suggestion of other flickrites.

Why do I think it hit Number 1? It's an OK shot, but I uploaded it the day the D200 was launched. The world was keen to see what the camera was capable of and it was the best of what turned out to be the biggest batch of D200 shots uploaded that day. Even this disaster had almost 1500 views...

More blogs about photography.

Tour of Britain

  National Champion 
  Originally uploaded by GuySwarbrick.

Every now and then you just accidentally get a shot you're pleased with but really weren't expecting. This is my most recent example, taken at last weekend's Tour of Britain during the Junior and Ladies support race.

I was tracking eventual race winner Russell Hampton as he lead a breakway and took a panning sequence the last frame of which was complete filled by a British Cycling advertising hoarding. Given that it was much likely to be something much less appropriate - e-on, T-Mobile or Transport for London - I was quite pleased.

Which is more than I can say for the rest of the day's work! I know photography isn't - and shouldn't be - the primary concern of event organisers, but for the second year running - despite using a completely different finishing circuit - they managed to arrange the start-finish line so that it was lined with trees (last year it was all buildings) and so that the riders were coming at you with the sun directly behind them.

 

So, despite it being a glorious late summer's afternoon with blazing sunshine and sweltering heat, you were either shooting directly into the sun or into deep shadow. Spot metering helped a bit - as did fill-in flash for the closer shots - but most of the output I've seen is dark and dismal and/or shows evidence of over processing to try to lift the riders out of the shadows.

The finishing circuit was also much less photogenic. There were plenty of landmarks earlier in the stage, so the guys on the motorbikes were well served, but for the rest of us it was Buckingham Palace or Buckingham Palace which was a shame.

More blogs about cycling photography.

Test

Mobile phone upload test

Small wonder

With the cycling season over - if only until the end of January - I need something to keep me busy on dull winter weekends and I've been finding plenty to do with the camera.

Inspired by the Macro competitions on the DPReviews forum, I had a couple of attempts at lashing together a macro rig by reversing my 50mm f1.8 lens. I didn't really know what I was doing but I quickly discovered that the D70 won't take a picture without a lens attached. I knew you could buy a reversing ring - and ordered one for a tenner from eBay - but I couldn't wait. I later discovered that the trick is to hold the lens in front of a regular lens, but I tried something similar but slightly more Heath Robinson - I fitted a teleconvertor onto the body and taped the 50mm to the front of it.

Coupled with the SB-800 mounted off-camera, alongside and slightly above the object, the setup worked fine - once I'd figured out how to fire the flash remotely in manual mode. The magnification was a little extreme but then I remembered I had a T-mount adaptor to use the camera with my telescope which I've never used because the camera is too heavy for the guide motors on the 'scope to cope with. It was separated from the telescope with an extension tube about 10cm long, but that unscrewed, allowing the 50mm to be connected (albeit with some insulating tape) to the mount. The first competition subject was 'Objects' and the sprocket above and the hardware shot (left) were the first shots I took. I was reasonably pleased with the results. But I took them on the last day of the competition so I didn't get a chance to act on any feedback.

 

The next competition was on the subect of food but I didn't manage to get an entry in during the week it ran. I did have a few attempts - this time using the extension tube from the telescope mount to try to vary the magnification. For some reason, any attempt to light the objects with the SB-800 resulted in an intense patch of light in the centre of the image which I suspect was caused by reflections on the shiny inner surface of the tube. At some point I'll try spraying the inner surfaces with some matt black paint.

By the third week I was feeling fairly confident and, with the subject set as 'Hands and feet' I decided to do something from left field and took a couple of shots of watches. Sadly, I hadn't read the small print and the hands and feet in question were supposed to be attached to a human...

Somewhat deflated, I left the camera on the tripod with the lens attached (with electrical tape, remember...) and went to bed. When I got up in the morning, the T-mount was still there but the lens had fallen a metre and a half onto a wooden floor during the night. Amazingly, it still worked - at least for the first couple of days.

It then stopped providing metering information to the camera and I thought it might be relegated to a full time macro role (one now secured by the reversing ring which arrived the same day), but a bit of fiddling around (removing and replacing the block which holds the electrical connectors) has restored this ridiculously good sub-£100 lens to its former glory. And this week's competition is The Christmas Spirit. Watch this space.