Tag Archives: week

Cycling Week at the Blog

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.

Blue Angels in Black and White

Blue Angels in Black and White

Blue Angels in Black and White. San Francisco, California. October 11, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

OK, now for something entirely different.

My original plan was to be in the eastern Sierra today on Saturday, patiently photographing peaceful and quiet aspen groves. But driving conditions did not look promising and I decided not to go. (I did go for the day on Sunday, but more on that later.) In any case, instead of shooting aspens I found myself on the waterfront of San Francisco Bay watching an air show featuring the Blue Angels, here photographed as they blew past directly overhead at a rather low altitude.

See, I can photograph things that move, too! :-)

Later note: Several people asked about the equipment I used to shoot this event. I used a Canon 5D with the Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS lens. I shot mostly at 400mm, but was glad to be able to zoom out on a few occasions when the action was a bit closer. My technique is to put the camera in burst mode, but usually just fire a single shot at a time. Most of the time I’m definitely not a “burst and hope for the best” sort of photographer – I’ll actually follow the action through the viewfinder and resist the temptation until the shot looks interesting. But not always. This shot was done in burst mode as the formation screamed almost directly overhead.

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