Photography tips

I found out a bit over a week ago that a group of 14 Cyclists were about to commence a ride from Adelaide to Melbourne over 8 days. The event would see the participants cycle over 1100Km in a bit over a week.

I further found out that 4 of the riders and 1 of the support crew are people who work for the same company as me. So, I got in touch with one of them and offered a bit of support.

The ride also has a purpose and that is to raise funds for the Cancer Council of South Australia.

I had a talk to one of the Riders who was involved and offered to take some photos of the participants as they left Adelaide and started their ride to Melbourne.

We got together on Friday and had a bit of a chat about the schedule, and what I hoped I could offer them.

So, on Saturday morning (28th April 07) The Riders were assembling from 07:00 near the spillway on the River, where they would pack their personal gear into the support vehicles and ride as a group 2km to Victoria Square where they would leave from around 8am.

I dragged myself out of bed and got down to their assembly area in order to take some photos just before they started. It was cold, miserable and the 4th day in a row of rain, so I knew I would be slightly challenged in taking some decent photo's.

I only had around 10 minutes to take an individual photo of each rider and a couple of group photos - as this was the first time that all the Riders had been together as a group.

I took a few minutes to find a suitable place to take the individual and group picture and took a few random shots for the purpose of checking the meter readings (and to peek at the histogram).

The individual shots, I wanted 1/2 body with their bikes and in order to do this I chose to use my 50-200mm zoom at around 70mm.  I picked a reasonable background that had a hint of the city in the skyline and ended up shooting at 200ISO F4.0.  I chose F4 as I wanted a fairly shallow DoF in the shots, and I had to go up to 200ISO so that I was shooting around 1/100 or faster.

I managed to get thru the individual shots much quicker than I thought and only re-done a couple of them - I noticed closed eyes or hats that caused too much shadow on their faces.

Once I had finished the individual shots, I got the 14 Riders to line up with their bikes ready for a couple of Group shots.

For the Group shots I chose to use my 11-22mm Lens - at 11mm of course! I did a couple of "front on" shots and then, I did a couple of "looking down the line" type shots.  The Front-on shot, I chose a shallow DoF -  F5, and for the down the line shots I wanted to have a deeper DoF and chose to use F8.

By this time the Riders were ready to roll and they headed off to the middle of town ready for their offical "start".  I also headed up to town and took some more photo's of the riders who were talking with ther Friends and family who had come out to see them off.  Of course, there were opportunities for some un-posed shots and there was some posed shots around the Banner with the names of their sponsors on it.

I also managed to get the Support crew together and get a photo of them.  I chose to just use the 11-22mm lens for these photos.

The riders finally managed to leave a bit after 8:30am. and started the first part of their 8 day ride.

I had also planned to meet up with the Riders at lunchtime and take a few more photos. As luck would have it, while I was driving to the place of their lunch stop, I came across them about 15km from their destination.  When an opportunity arose, We went past them and found a location about 3-4km ahead of them at the  side of the road.  I grabbed the 50-200 and grabbed a few quick photos as they came down the hill towards me, then followed them the last 3km to their lunch stop.

At the lunch stop it was raining (still) and I chose to grab my 14-54mm Lens to capture a few photos of everyone over lunch and leaving on the rest of their ride.

At the end of the day, I had around 80 photo's and later in the day I set out and processed them.  Out of the 83 photo's I chose to put 66 of them into a gallery. I was very pleased with the amount of photo's that I think were worthy of being put into a gallery, and the majority of the 17 that didn't make the cut were duplicates where people were facing the wrong way or had their eyes closed.

Now, I will have to wait for a couple of weeks for feedback on the photo's when the Riders get back to town. I was very happy with the results personally, considering the awful weather conditions!

This shoot was done by me for a couple of reasons - 1 was to do it to show my support for the Riders as it was the least I could do. The other reason was to shoot under conditions that are a bit new to me - and learn what I could from it. Now, what I really did learn from this event was that I was able to step in with a very short timeframe and get the required photos with almost no effort. Talk to the people, get their co-operation and get the photo so I was not holding them up. I found I really enjoyed the interaction and the opportunity to document part of the event for the participants.

I do plan on getting 14 copies of 1 of the photos and 5 copies of another of the photo's printed and give them to the Riders and Support Crew on their return.

Take a moment to look at the website of their ride.