I spent the first weekend of September at Mount Stromlo, Canberra, covering the UCI World Mountain Bike Championships. I drove down with Murray on the Thursday afternoon to get the Accreditations, then we shot Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Last year at the World Cup we are both sick with various ailments, but this time we were good to go. Some great results. As usual, I overcomplicated things, while Murray kept it simple and clean.
I used flash for most of the weekend using the PocketWizard ETTL flash system. My aim was to shoot backlit and to fill the subjects with flash. It worked ok, but even using 2 x 580EX flashes I lacked some punch against the sun. I was pushing it a little however, trying to shoot 1/1600th in high speed sync at f5.6. Generally I just pumped the flashes to full power and went from there.
Here’s the video of the weekend….it’s a bit big, so please be patient while it loads….
I did try something interesting and that was to use a fish eye with the flash on the hot-shoe (at full power), but the flash head was zoomed to 50mm. This gave a tight center of light in the frame and as long as I kept the rider in that spot as they flew past, It looked great. With the fisheye you can use f5 and due to the lenses great hyperfocalqualities, everything was sharp.
Click HEREto see our results.