The Queen Of Pain

[Photo-John]

Professional endurance racer Rebecca Rusch, who's Twitter handle is @thequeenofpain, racing the Park City Point-to-Point race, yesterday.

This was taken with the Canon EOS 7D, Canon 18-200mm IS lens and a Canon 550EX flash fired by PocketWizards.

[Chris350]

nice John.. Mine aren't that clean in a similar setting.

[Photo-John]

nice John.. Mine aren't that clean in a similar setting.

Thanks, Chris. I guess it all balances out because my 70-200 shots are about 90% out of focus. I think the lens needs a trip to Canon

[Chris350]

Here's Amanda Carey coming off Guardsman Pass.

[Photo-John]

Nice! I like the flowers in the foreground.

[Photo-John]

Pushing the limit of dynamic range, that is. The glare of this photographer's dome was too much for the sensor on my 7D

[ksbryan0]

PJ, that dome you speak of is a natural reflector that we hair-impaired people pack with us at all times. Too much light?...put the hat on. Need some fill?...doff the cap. Works great! Nice shots, by the way.

[Photo-John]

I've been working my way through my Park City Point-To Point race photos and I am really pleased - especially considering that I didn't really know the course and my 70-200mm lens pretty much completely failed me. One thing I think I did well is be creative and experiment. The kiss of death for event photos is uniformity. To cover an event well you want a wide variety of photos to give a good overall feel of the event. There were some things I missed but when I look at the body of photos I'm pretty happy with the diversity.

This first batch is from the race start. The race covered 80 miles of trail and I ended up driving to and shooting four locations. The race started right at dawn and then they did one lap at that venue so I was able to set up and wait for them. They rode back into the sunlight, which was rough for them but great for photos. The morning light was syrupy beautiful

[Photo-John]

I got to play and experiment a bunch with this race. Besides using the radio slave and flash in the woods, I also played with sun flare, backlighting, backgrounds and blurred foreground elements. Here are some of my successful experiments. The photo with the steeple in the background is about context. Sometimes a sports photo could have been taken anywhere. But I saw that steeple and realized it would make a great background that tells more of a location story than just the standard rider on the trail photo.

[Photo-John]

Friend of the site, Grizzly Adam, crossing the finish line at just over 9 hours. That's right - 9 hours on the bike. The top men finished the 80 miles in just over 7 hours. This isn't your average, casual mountain bike race.

[Photo-John]

Some dirty faces and blood. No mountain bike race coverage would be complete without them

[GrizzlyAdam]

Sweet! It was a lot of fun seeing you out on course a few times. The images look great. I love the looks on Jeff and Sonya's faces (the 2 Ergon riders). So classic. And having you stick a camera in my face at the finish was awesome... I felt like a celebrity.

I'm looking forward to seeing more from your day on the mountain.

[Photo-John]

Glad you enjoyed these. I really like that one of Sonya and Jeff. That's one of my favorites from the event. Unfortunately, the only ones I got of you on the bike are the one of you finishing and one from behind as you left Round Valley.

Working on more photos and an article for Mtbr now...

[mattb]

Nice work John! I like all the variety. I have been working with some off-camera flash techniques for mtb races too. I can't show you my 24 Hrs in the Sage photos now but I hope Mountain Flyer will post them soon. Coming up I hope to catch some Vapor Trail madness next weekend of my broken flash gets back from Sigma in time!
For the Rebecca Rusch pic in the woods, where was the flash? Looker's right, right? On a stand, ground, or clamped to something? Do you use TTL with the PocketWizards or go manual?

[Photo-John]

For the Rebecca Rusch pic in the woods, where was the flash? Looker's right, right? On a stand, ground, or clamped to something? Do you use TTL with the PocketWizards or go manual?

The flash was on a tripod to the viewer's right. My PocketWizards are the ancient "Plus" model so the flash exposure is all manual. And a pain in the ass

[Chris350]

Nice stuff John. The steeple is spot on; it is all about context otherwise it's just another dude on a bike photo.. I'm still unhappy to have missed the morning light.

[Roger79]

EXCELLENT stuff John, I like these and they've inspired me to do some riding between shoots...
Thanks for the posts.
Roger

[Photo-John]

EXCELLENT stuff John, I like these and they've inspired me to do some riding between shoots...
Thanks for the posts.
Roger

I'm glad I could inspire you to *ride* instead of shoot. Sometimes that's a tough choice to make. It also means my photos did their job

[zerodog]

Very nice man! Lovin the flash action.

[Photo-John]

Very nice man! Lovin the flash action.

Glad you like them. I don't get the PocketWizards out much but it seemed like the right thing to do for this race and I'm pretty pleased with the way they came out. If you want to see more, there's a short article and a lot more photos on Mtbr: Park City Point-to-Point Race | Mountain Bike Review

[ruosis]

I like all of them,pictures, men and women. sports is the important part of our life.