In the Turn – American Velodrome Challenge. Hellyer Park Velodrome, San Jose, California. June 26, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
The pack comes through the banked turn near the end of a night race at Hellyer Park Velodrome, San Jose, California.
Expect a whole series of motion-blurred photographs of night bicycle track racing over the next few days! I shot a few hundred frames at the Friday night American Velodrome Challenge races at the Hellyer Park Velodrome in San Jose, California as they ran keirin and miss-and-out races. Track bike racing, especially at the level of these races, provides some really great photographic opportunities. As I mentioned in a reply to a poster concerning a previous photograph in this series, there are few sports events where you have such close and continuous access to the competitors – while they race, while they prepare to race, and even in post-race settings. Bicycle racing can be very hard to photograph. While track racing doesn’t eliminate all of the complexities (heck, I shot these at night!, and the riders go by very, very quickly) at least it gives you many more opportunities to be close to the action than, say, professional road racing.
In this series I decided to forego straight photojournalistic style shots of racers. Been there, done that. I decided instead to push the capabilities of my gear and my technique (and my good luck!) a bit and shoot mostly without flash or, as in this shot, combine some fill flash with essentially natural light exposures. I shot at very slow – for such an event – shutter speeds, often working at between 1/50 second and down to 1/8 of a second or longer. Mostly I tried to shoot somewhat tightly framed images with a 70-200mm lens and pan with the riders as they approached and flew past. To be honest, you need to make a lot of exposures when shooting this way if you hope to get a few good ones – there are just far too many variables to be able to precisely control them in a predictable way. That said, there are some techniques that can increase the success rate. Some are obvious, such as practicing the panning motion required to track the riders. Others are less obvious, like learning to keep the riders framed properly at high speeds, or selecting focus points depending upon how you’ll try to compose the shot, and so forth.
For a guy who usually shoots from the tripod, doing this sort of work is a welcome contrast and it pushes me to think in ways that are quite different from my usual patterns.
This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
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