Patriot Triathlon - Rio Rancho, NM

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The past couple of weekends have seen me doing some action shoots.  I'm still way behind sorting and editing last week's photoshoot at Sandia Motor Speedways, but I'll post some shots up from that session soon.  I recently bought my L Zoom lenses primarily for these types of shoots (along with the versatility for weddings and other events down the road).


In the meantime, Andie Talmadge is now into her third year of organizing and directing the Patriot Triathlon here in Rio Rancho, NM, in honor of 9/11.   She does a great job putting this on and it's already grown from a little over 200 participants the first year, to appr. 430 this year.  She had some official photographers out there but I was out there to do some casual shooting and practice event shooting for future opportunities.  (Well, I ended up with something like 1200 shots, so much for a fun shoot).   A quick sort and edit yielded some that I like.


I took most of the shots today with my Canon EF70-200mm f2.8 IS II USM, a fanastic zoom for this kind of action; it really focuses fast and delivers a great image across the zoom and aperture range.  I was in pretty tight for the bike return/run transition, so I used my Canon EF24-70mm f2.8 USM lens for the panning shots.

Select the images below to see them Large size, and select them again from the Large view to see them even larger.



Andie giving her pre-start speech and instructions.

Andie's husband John - he's the "muscle" behind the Triathlon.  Looks like he had a brief respite here and took time to smile, but he's a man in constant motion until the Triathlon gets under way, and then spends his time encouraging the participants as they make their way around the bike and run courses.

Vince Hinman, co-owner of High Desert Bikes here in Rio Rancho (with a second store in NE Albq open for about a year).  Great local bike shop that really takes care of its customers.  Vince had a large stash of bar ends for both standard and triathlon bars.  Amazing how many people show up with missing ones.  He was giving them out a pretty good clip there for awhile.  I think he was setting up for a quick tube replacement on this one.  It's also amazing how many people show up at Triathlons with poorly setup tires.

I took up a good position at the swim-bike transition.  It worked out great since it was a nice, long transition down the side of the aquatic center.  I had a straight shot as they ran, jogged, walked to the transition area entrance and could take several of each athlete with my camera set to continuous mode (the 50D will shoot 6.3 fps).  I spent a lot of time here and probably got shots of over half of the athletes.

Instead of freezing action like the people that are shooting to sell for the event, I took up a position near the bike-run transition zone and panned shots to get some motion blur.   I haven't gone through all of the shots yet, but liked these three.   The middle one is none other than Art Gardenschwartz, long-time local sports retailer in the Albuquerque area, still going strong at near-70 years old.   I'd love to be able to get shots like this of every biker but that's pretty difficult -- way too much activity at the transition zone and I was shooting these at 1/30 of a second due to the slow speed of the bikes (I think this is easier with race cars, really) so its a hit-miss propsition anyway.  I did this knowing that I'd get a few keepers and toss the rest.

After taking shots of the returning bikes for awhile, I moved over to the finish line for a few shots.  Wish I'd taken more there.

It was funny being a "casual" shooter that looked like one of the event shooters.  A lot of the participants would catch me raising the lens and then give a big smile.

And finally, as I was leaving, this couple asked me to take their photo.  I didn't get any contact info, so I'll have to trace them down through Andie and get this shot to them.  I think they'll like it.

Morning Balloons

I was heading out for a bike ride a couple of weeks ago, and as I opened the garage door to put the bike on top of my Passat, there were at least a couple of dozen balloons up in the air visible from the house. Yes, Balloon Fiesta is almost upon us, and I guess I'll probably go out there for the first time in years, now that I'm shooting a nice DLSR - who can pass up photographing such colorful objects.

I've had more noise in my photos than I'd really like, and I was considering moving to full-frame but decided to upgrade lenses first. I'll still move to full-frame one of these days, at least for some of my shots. Actually, I think the setup I'd like to have is a 7D crop-sensor for sports work and a Mark 5D ii full frame for landscape, portrait, wedding work. But for now, I'm the proud new owner of a new EF 24-70 f2.8 USM and 70-200 IS USM ii (Canon's newest 70-200), and I'll keep shooting the EOS 50D, for now, although I'll be on the hunt for a wider-angle lens than the 24-70 (and something I can still use on full frame later).

The first batch of photos on these lenses turned out so much cleaner and sharper event at 1600 ISO on the EOS 50D. I can't imagine what the Mark 5D images would look like (well, I can since I've viewed so many on Flickr). The 70-200 is especially sweet - I can't believe how good the images are off that long zoom, and so far the Autofocus seems really fast and on-target.

I'll be shooting the races at Sandia Motor Speedway, Saturday so I'll get a chance to put the 70-200 through its paces.  And the Patriot Triathlon is taking place next weekend here in Rio Rancho, and I plan on having fun with that lens out there, as well.

All of the shots below were shot with my EF 400mm f5.6 USM lens that I recently bought, and before I'd gotten the other L-lenses. Once I saw the images from this lens, I knew that I'd have to upgrade to the L-lenses in the shorter focal lengths and that they would have to have awesome images.

Click on the images to get a bigger view (and again to see them even bigger).

Canon EOS 50D

EF 400mm f2.8 USM Lens

Some were really high:

And some were really low:

This one came almost directly over the house and I had to let it drift away a bit, otherwise the 400mm lens was too long:

I love how the 400mm L-quality lens resolved the little tiny flag on the yellow/red/orange balloon in these next two shots:

Going with the Flow

An image can still be good, sometimes you just can't force it.  That's what occured with this photo, shown in two flavors below.   I'd done some street shots, late in the evening - essentially after the sun was down - at Boise's Basque Festival (Boise has a large Basque population and has a festival each year) and did some post-processing to cleanup the images.

I do most of my post-processing with Adobe Lightroom, which is a great cataloge application, which also contains a lot of powerful editing features.  If you don't need to do multiple layer work, you may never need Photoshop.  I like to have several programs, since I usually find things that one does better than the others (or exclusively).   I'm also playing with Topaz's suite of applications like "Adjust" and "DeNoise", and will probably get a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements one of these days.

Both Lightroom and Adjust have presets built-in, and you can find a wide variety of presets on the Web, which makes your workflow a lot faster.   I frequently make my own from scratch or based on other presets that might be close but not quite perfect for a particular photo (or batch of them taken at the same time, in similar conditions).

On to the photos - the light was low and I was using Shutter-Priority and Auto-Iso which caused the ISO scaled up to 1600, and with an f2.8 lens, I was still able to get a decent shot without using Flash.   One thing I don't like about my Canon EOS 50D is the higher noise it seems to generate at these ISO's (even at 400 ISO, I have to do more cleanup than I'd like, and sometimes at even lower ISOs - but once cleaned up, I get some very sharp images most of the time).   I attempted to take the noise out of this photo, but there was enough noise that it didn't look that great, so in "Going with the Flow", I used some Lightroom presets and made them into more classic-looking street scenes.

Here's the exposure info:


Canon EOS 50D
Tamron 17-50mm
ISO 1600
1/500 @f2.8 (+2EV)
Shot at 21mm and cropped.

Boise - Basque Festival 2010

Boise - Basque Festival 2010

The Many Faces of Zoey

On a recent trip to Idaho, Zoey the cat friended me.  Not in the somewhat impersonal way of Twitter, Facebook, et al, but rather every time I walked by her as she sat in her spot on one of the side counters, she'd stick her head out and want some lovin'.   

It's funny, I've never been particularly attracted to cats, partly stemming from allergies to them from time to time, but they always seem to like me, and I've grown more fond of them as I've gotten older.  They certainly are one of the most photogenic subjects around.  Zoey has a beautiful face and eyes.

Captured these with my EOS 50D, Tamron 70-200 f2.8 zoom, handheld.  Processed with some favorite Lightroom presets to give some sightly different looks.  I like them all, really.  

Motion

Sometimes a little blur can bring more out in a photo. The backyard was fairly dark, so I had a fairly low shutter speed, ranging from 1/4-1/60th of a second, but it captured the motion perfectly.

Equipment:

- Canon EOS 50D
- Tamron 90mm f2.8 Macro (doubles nicely as a medium-reach portrait lens on a crop-frame camera)
- No flash, which caused the slower shutter speed and motion blur. Using flash would have been too static for these shots.

Oh, and I updated my site header and the colors of the site, using a custom template I got from a template site. The site header photo is a texture shot that I just took in Yellowstone National Park - I don't remember which geyser basin offhand but it had some incredible colors and textures.

A Night at the Ballgame

Spent last Friday evening at the local minor league ballpark, taking some photos of the Albuquerque Isotopes game, the stadium, and people at the park. I was trying out a 400mm f5.6 Canon lens that I was hoping to purchase from a co-worker (and since have).

Even in relatively low light, I managed several nice shots with this lens, along with my Tamron 70-200mm f2.8 and Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 zooms, which are nice fast zooms, although I have lens fever now that I've had one of Canon's USM lenses in my hands - very smooth, fast focus.

I plan on using this lens on an Idaho trip next weekend. We'll be up there visiting family and spending 5 days in the Driggs, Idaho/Grand Teton area. This lens will be great for some long reach when we various birds and wildlife.

On to the pictures, hope you enjoy!