swarbrick.com - the blog

Day 2 - Postponed

How do people manage to screw up the really, really simple stuff? Free practice starts at 9 today, so the press office opens at 8 to allow us all to get set up. Unfortunately, the VIP car park - which the press office gave us passes for - opens at 10.
I'm normally pretty good at blagging my way past mindless bureaucracy, but at 8.45 I'm in McDonalds having had breakfast (but still waiting for my coffee to get cold enough to drink) wondering a) what I'm going to do for the next hour and a half b) why I couldn't have stayed in bed for another couple of hours and c) whether I brought my monopod. At least the last is easily answered - even if I don't quite have enough time to go home for it if I have forgotten it.
Still, at least this blog has wasted 5 minutes...

Press facilities at the 'new' Wembley

I have to say, after the very impressive setup at the World Track Championships at Manchester in March, I'm a little disappointed with the facilities at Wembley. Yes, they're superficially similar - hot and cold running power, ethernet, tea and coffee - and there's a great view of the track, erm, pitch... from here, but for some reason it seems a little underwhelming.

There's a cold, wet, outdoor workstation with a similar setup, which I may use tomorrow - but probably not. And, unfortunately, there's limited access to the track for photographic purposes.

For safety reasons you can't get down on to trackside - when the cars whack the barriers they do tend to move them - and the barriers get in the way of the pictures, unless you can find the right spot. Today's not too bad as the public aren't in and we have pretty free access. Tomorrow, when it matters, is going to be a bit of a pain, I think. Especially given that I'm only really here to cover one, one lap race so I have to get it right. No pressure then.

Coming from a software development background (long time ago...), I know that changing one variable at a time as a sensible approach. And I'd vote for sensible every time. I just can't do it myself. So, as well as shooting in a large outdoor sports stadium for the first time, I'm also using two new lenses that I've effectively had no practice time with whatsoever (Nikkor 400mm and 14-24mm - of which, more later) and a Gary Fong Lightsphere II - again, never used it before... I am, as Jeremy Clarkson might say, a mental. Still, I'll probably only be using one of them at a time!

To ease the problems a little they started the practice session with some cute little Punto Abarths to let the drivers get used to the circuit and, while it clearly wasn't their intention, to allow me to practice shooting cars, which I haven't done for a long, long time. They were nice and slow and relatively predictable.

Of course, in the rain with the roof as shut as it would go, they've got headlights on, the stadium lights are on, everything's reflecting off the track and the metering's having a great time trying to figure out what the hell's going on. I can see me and Lightroom spending a lot of time together tomorrow evening!

Lessons learned so far. The 400mm focuses very, very quickly; 1/200 is fine for most of the shots to get a sharp car with blurred wheels and a slight blur to the background - at least, it is with the Puntos!

Press conference in 45 minutes. First chance to try out the Lightsphere. In the meantime, how slowly would you take one of these round what is, in effect, an ice rink...?

Remote flash

At last! Real success with the flash (well, mostly!). I used it extensively at three end of season events - Palmer Park's Mountain Bike Championships, a turbo training session and the final Gorrick mountain bike event of the season.

At the mountain bike champs (where it rained constantly and the D70, 80-200 and SB-800 continued to work faultlessly thanks to a £5 rip-stop nylon rain cover) I shot entirely handheld with the SB-800 mounted on the camera and was very pleased with the results. Yes, there was the occasional image that was slightly under or over exposed (usually because I was stupidly close or hopelessly far away) but in almost every case I was able to get a very usable image by playing with the exposue compensation settings in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin.

In fact, it was mostly the experience on this shoot which has finally convinced me to go to RAW in all circumstances and live with the overhead of batch processing to get JPGs to upload to the website. It even encouraged me to go back and recover a lot of images that I'd taken in RAW in the past and not bothered to PP. Many of them were perfectly good after putting them through Rawshooter Premium.

The only real problem is that the pictures don't really give any sense of just what a foul, wet, miserable day it was. But that's probably just as well - the riders probably don't need or want to be reminded!

At the turbo trainer session I decided to be a bit more creative. I put the SB-800 on an old tripod with the diffuser on and bounced it off the curved perspex stadium roof. For the most part it worked really well, lighting the riders from the front with the light from the edge of the diffuser and providing an all over light from the bounce on the roof.

Unfortunately a problem I'd had a couple of times recurred. Using the SB-800 in remote mode with the D70 set up as the commander works brilliantly but occasionally (or frequently, these days) it results in some strange effects - producing wacky pop-art images which many people seem to find oddly attractive but which nobody has yet been interested in buying.

Out of 150 or so shots taken at the stadium, about a dozen showed the effect. There's no obvious pattern to when it happens but it is very frustrating because they often seem to have been shots that would have been pretty good if it hadn't happen. Well, they would, wouldn't they?

After a couple of weeks of chasing Nikon I've finally got them to admit it's a genuine, reproducible fault - albeit an intermittent one - and they've suggested I send the camera back for repair. I've got one more event to shoot before Christmas - the Palmer Park awards ceremony - and then it's off to Gray's of Westminster. Christmas without a camera is going to be frustrating, though.

It does need to be done because at the Gorrick race the following day I used a similar setup and the problem cropped up again - about 20 times in 4-500 flash shots. It was driving me mad!

I setup half way down a steep-ish drop off with the flash on the tripod another couple of metres down the track. I was quite close to the riders and started off with the 80-200 but was always at the wide end, so I switched over and took some shots with the 18-70. That was a bit slow for the conditions so I dug out the f1.8 50mm and, although it's not supposed to be that sharp wide open I wanted as much light getting in as possible so I shot at f1.8 and around 1/50s.

It was tough being consistent, but the good shots were great! A real sense of movement from the blurred woodland. The full shoot is on swarbrick.com.

More blogs about cycling photography.

The end is nigh

Well, the end of the season, anyway.

Since the last entry I've done three very different events - with very different results. To try to reduce the boredom factor I'll cover each separately.

The first was the Midlands Youth Tour, which I previewed in the last entry. I knew there were going to be five very different stages over the three days, but I wasn't quite prepared for how different the weather - and, as a consequence - the photography would be.

Stage 1 was a 5km time trial for the Under 14s and Under 16s on a B-road running into an industrial estate and pretty simple from a photographic perspective. Half decent light - thick cloud but still quite bright, early summer afternoon. I stood about a mile and a half into the 3 mile course and waited - one rider at a time, a minute or so apart; get the focus locked a good way out and then track them through. Got a couple of shots I was very pleased with including some pretty tight close ups.

There was then a long wait before Stage 2, which was on the Curborough Sprint Circuit. A great venue - the only problem was that it was being used for motor racing. By the time  the riders got onto the circuit, the cloud was thick and black and the light was fading fast. With separate Under 8, Under 10, Under 12, Under 14 and Under 16 races scheduled it looked like the older riders were going to be riding in the dark, but in the end the cloud started to clear about halfway through to make up for the sun starting to disappear over the horizon so it stayed gloomy but tolerable throughout.

You would be able to see the variation of light conditions by looking at the Under 8 and Under 16 pictures, but I managed, somehow, to lose all the pictures from the final race (including some superb shots of the bunch with a rainbow in the background).

How it happened is a bit of a mystery. I had four CF cards with me - one 2Gb and three 1Gb cards - which was clearly not going to be enough for a three day tour, so I also had my laptop. I'd only used the 2Gb card and two of the smaller ones on the first day but had two stages to shoot on day two, so I transferred all the photos to the laptop, in my normal way, deleted the images off the card (or so I thought) and turned the laptop off without have reviewed or post-processed any of the images.

The following morning I put the first card on and there were images on it. I assumed I had forgotten to delete though, so I wiped the card and reused it. When I filled that one up I put the next one in and that had images on it, too. Worried now, I put that card aside and used a different one. I managed t get some photos onto the laptop in the afternoon and so avoid using the 'full' card from the day before.

When I got back to the hotel I found that I didn't have the images from that card on the laptop and I didn't have the images from the Under 16 race anywhere. I probably have been more annoyed (actually, I was 24 hours later - see my bike blog) but not very often.

Anyway, to return to the plot, Stage 2 was over the tight, twisty sprint circuit in the near-dark, so was the obvious choice for my first experiments with the SB-800. And, I have to say, I was quite pleased with the results. I had the diffuser on the majority of the time because I didn't want to distract the riders. It worked from that point of view but did mean that the range on the flash was very short. Very impressed though.

The third stage was another time trial - this time for the Under 8, Under 10 and Under 12 riders  over 1.5km round internal roads at RAF Cosford near Wolverhampton. I took a different approach for this and set up at the start and took a set of pictures of each rider - a close-up as they prepared for the off and a series of shots of them powering away from the line. Some of the individual shots have come out quite well, but it isn't the most exciting set of photos in the world. The light wasn't great, either - a combination of grey clouds and shade from surrounding trees.

Stage 4 was a road race for all ages on a longer version of the Cosford circuit. The nice thing about this one - apart from (mostly) brighter weather - was that the races were long enough for me to adopt my Gorrick technique of walking the course backwards during the race to get lots of pictures from different viewpoints, although after the fifth and final race I felt more exhausted than most of the riders looked!

I spent quite a long time trying to get a shot I wanted outside the Joint Services School of Aeronautical Engineering of the usual RAF fibreglass Spitfire with the four service flags flying above it and the main pack riding past. I only had the 80-200 lens with me, so I couldn't quite get the shot I wanted and the light all disappeared at that point, but I'm resonably pleased with the result, which is at the top of this blog.

Finally, the Bank Holiday Monday saw us in a farmer's field in Chesterton for Stage 5,  the only 'real' road circuit of the tour - 5km of twisty, hilly roads in beautiful countryside with glorious sunshine - and rain. Nothing complicated, photgraphically. The best shots were taken from the top of a long climb, which was pretty, showed some real suffering on the faces of the competitors and had the additional advantage that they weren't moving very fast.

The other vantage point I quite liked was on top of a huge spoil heap, looking down on the start finish line. Not the most glamorous place to be, but an unusual angle!

After that it was off to the pub for the presentations and on with the SB-800 again. The lighting was dreadful with a very brightly lit window behind the riders as they received their awards. Without the flash I doubt I would have got anything useful (although, to be fair, the pop-up flash on the D70 isn't bad) but I didn't much like what I got with it.

Experimenting with bouncing it off walls and ceilings was quite fun though. And the irony is, after taking 4,000 pictures I've so far sold a grand total of one. From the presentations.

 

More blogs about cycling photography.