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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.
