TourDownUnder
January each year sees the Tour Down Under hit Adelaide and the surrounding area. The Tour is a 5 day cycling race that attracts riders from all ouver the World.
The Day before the actual tour starts there is a 50km street race called the Adelaide Classic. When the Classic was held a few days ago, I took a few photos.
The Classic starts at 7pm and this year had around 120 riders competing, and is held on a 2km long street circuit in the Adelaide Parklands. Last year (2006) I took some photos of the event and had a bit of an Idea as what to expect for the race.
I arrived about 90 minutes before the start and saw the end of a ladies event on the circuit. I spent the 90 minutes walking around the whole circuit to find a suitable place to shoot from. I finally found the place that geve me nearly everything I was looking for. The location I chose was approx 200metres onto the first main straight on the course at the bottom of the only downhill (slight) section of the circuit.
My location was chosen for 3 main reasons
- I had a good clear vantage point of the approaching cyclist
- The background was not too distracting
- The light would remain good for the whole hour
As an added bonus, I found that there were not a lot of other spectators crowding this area which made it much easier to have the opportunity to get all the shots I wanted.
As you can see, the location met all of my requirements pretty well!
Set up in my location, I only had about 10 minutes of waiting before the race started, so a double check of the Camera setting to make sure that everything was as I needed it for the race.
I set up with my Longest telephoto lens on the distant corner and waited for the riders to come around the corner in a pack
First photo, and a couple of seconds later the next photo
I knew that I probably would not see the whole group of riders together like this for the rest of the race. (I was right)
A couple of laps later, the Cyclists were all stretched out in a long line as they were zipping past at around 50+KM/h !
If you look carefullt, you can get a bit of an idea of the speed they were travelling at.
Now each lap only gave me the chance to get 3 and sometimes 4 photos, so the first couple of laps I used to get my shooting technique sorted out for the rest of the day.
I only shot 2 laps using the 50-200mm Zoom, and all other laps I shot with my 14-54mm. After only 2 laps I realised that the auto focus just wasn't cutting it and I had only 1 picture that was ok. So of course the only other option was to go manual focus. I took another lap or 2 to sort out the best approach and pretty quickly worked out that the best settings for me were to set the Aperture to around f6.3 and the zoom to around 35mm. I did vary the zoom generally between 25mm and 50mm.
It quickly became obvious that the bikes were all going past on the opposite side of the track to me which was around 3-4Metres from me, so I had a pretty good idea where I needed to Focus.
Now, with the bikes dashing past at 50+km/h I knew if I wanted to freeze the action I would have had to use a VERY fast shutter speed or flash. In fact I chose to not use either.
What I actually did was to set the ISO so the shutter speed was between 1/60 and 1/200. Initially, it was 100 ISO, and as the event went on, the sun started to set and I had to increase the ISO to 200 and finally 400.
So, with a low shutter speed, the only way to capture the cyclists was for me to pan. Yes, I framed the rider when they were around 30M from me, followed them, focused and pressed the shutter while I was moving and captured the shot I was after.
What I really wanted to do was to try and capture individual cyclists that were zapping past me at high speed. I wanted to really give the impression that they were really moving (because they were!).
This is one of the best examples of a panned photo - I followed the rider, released the shutter as he was level with me and kept moving thru the shot. ou will notice that there is considerable movement in the fence in the background, and you really do get an idea of speed from the photo.
Technical info for those interested - ISO 100, 29mm, F8, 1/125sec
Of course, because I used the first couple of laps to get my technique sorted out I managed to shoot a considerable number of "keepers" for the day.
This one, even though I missed part of the back wheel was probably my favourite panned shot of the day. This one was shot at ISO 100, 40mm, F5.6 1/100sec.
I managed to isolate the cyclist by using a shallow DOF, get an incredibly sharp image that still shows a lot of movement - both in the background fence and the spokes of the wheels.
On the day, I took around 100 photos and in the end, I culled this down to an incredibly high 19 that I ended up putting into a gallery.
It was a fun event to shoot and in the end, I was really pleased with the results.
