The Amgen Tour of California comes to my part of the world every February, and I take advantage of the opportunity to shoot a different sort of subject than those more typically found here. So the next week or so may be a sort of “cycling week” at my blog as I post photographs of the first few stages.

Yesterday I attended the first event, the prologue time trial stage in Sacramento, California. While in some ways a time trial can be the least exciting type of cycling race given that it is purely one rider at a time against the clock, on the other hand this type of event provides tremendous opportunities to photograph the riders – and this is largely what I concentrated on yesterday. Before the race I photographed groups of riders doing their pre-race circuits of the course and then I shot a number of them as they warmed up by the team vans. Later, during the race, I picked a few good spots and photographed riders as they came into view one by one.

Today’s stage runs from Davis to Santa Rosa. The original plan was to be at the starting line in Davis and then head on over to Santa Rosa, but the weather today is just plain awful. We’re foregoing the start in Davis but we’ll try to be at the finish line in Santa Rosa when the group comes in later this afternoon.