So I’ve heard of Xterra triathlons before this past weekend but this was the first one I observed. I knew where the Snow Valley park was as it is local to me but I never envisioned people traversing it in this manner. In case you don’t know where it is, Snow Valley is located in the San Bernardino National Forest off Highway 18 at 7000 feet… and that’s the parking lot! From there it’s up the mountain at least 400 feet to the lake where the swim took place. Most triathlons I have covered place Transition 1 and Transition 2 at the same place. Not so with this one. T1 is at the lake so the athletes had to bike up to the lake before the race even started.

Hiking up to the lake

In order to cover the event I decided I would need to hike up to the lake as well. It was not too bad and myself and my amateurendurance.com friends got a ride in the back of a truck when we were about half way up.  From there I observed the swim and then moved to get in position for the mountain biking.

Biking through the loose stuff

All I can say about the bike is “loose rocks and sand”. Mountain biking is my personal favorite sport and seeing these athletes perform was awesome. I saw a plethora of bikes with a huge selection of hard tails and some really nice dual suspension bikes. Some people were totally comfortable on their bikes, you could tell, and others just wanted to finish alive. I think about a third of the pack had taken a spill of some kind or another by the second time around. They had to do one and a half laps on the bike.

Then you have to run up that

What what what?! Yes, you have to run up that! Seriously the run course looked like it would be impossible to just ascend let alone run up. By this point more then a few people just want to finish. The crazy thing is the winner finished the run before some people even began their second lap of the bike.  This event was a total adventure. I’d recommend it to the most adventurous among you and for everyone else you should spectate one because it is totally fun. Photographing was challenging with the perfect clear skies casting harsh shadows. I used my flash in the broad daylight and experimented a lot. You can see race coverage over at amateurendurance.com and check out more of our photos in the Gallery.

How to shoot at an Aquarium

Step 1: Forget the Flash

When you go to an aquarium it is a courtesy to the sea life to not bombard them with fill flash. Besides the glass on the aquariums will bounce back the light and ruin your photograph. Yes you could shoot at an angle and reduce the bounce back but just be kind to the fishies and forget the flash.

Step 2: Use a fast lens

If you are using a point and shoot then you get to use the lens you have but if you have an SLR then use a fast lens. Another idea is to use a prime because usually these can be even faster then their zoom counterparts. Jamie used a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens on the photo above.

Step 3: Learn to set the ISO

The rule is to bump up the ISO last after everything else has been done to improve shutter speed. So if you are shooting at f/1.8 and you can’t turn on more light (which you can’t at the aquarium) and you can’t use a fill flash and you photos are still blurry then you might need to bump the ISO. The higher the ISO the more noise. With film this will translate to more noticeable grain. Either one is better than blur. Luckily reducing ISO noise is a top priority for the camera manufacturers so as time goes on this will improve.

Step 4: Be patient

Fish and Sea Mammals are not going to pose for the camera so sometimes you just have to be patient to get the shot. Next time you are at an aquarium put these four steps to practice and see what develops.

Be sure to check out our other shots in the gallery.

Oh yeah, we also got some amazing sunset shots. Aww…the sun setting over the Southern California coast, is there anything more beautiful?

Early One Morning

Well the first thing you have to face when covering a triathlon is getting up way too early in the morning. It is well worth it but when that alarm goes off you ask yourself just for a moment “What was I thinking”. So Jamie and I piled into Jay’s vehicle and went off towards the starting line and transition area. Jay is our friend who participated in the event along with hundreds of other triathletes. We arrived and Jay went off to prepare and warm up while Jamie took a spot along the bike route and I took a spot on the run course.

It’s Dark Early in the Morning

So guess what? It’s dark early in the morning before the sun comes up. This made shooting the swim pretty futile. That and the fact that even a 200mm lens was not enough reach. I later noticed that the light meter gets easily confused by water too. Either it was that or all the bright orange kayaks and yellow swim caps. Either way my swim photos were useless.
Jamie got a good shot at the turn around point for the swim though.

“I hit 47 mph on the downhill!”

Jay told us he hit 47 mph on the downhill section of the bike part of the race. In case you don’t know, anything over about 30mph feels really fast on a bicycle. This is especially true on road bike with brakes about as wide as my pinky finger. Jamie got some great shots of the bike riders including this great panning shot.

Time to hit the pavement

Once the athletes transitioned from the bike they got into their running shoes to finish out the triathlon. I positioned myself so I could take photos of the runners along two points in their run without moving from my location. This worked well and I was able to get some great shots. The funny thing is runners can look awkward depending on where they are in their stride when you take the photo. This one came out pretty well.

Lessons learned

Jamie and I learned a couple of lessons at this event. First is always bring more memory then you think you will need. The second is that sometimes setting the autofocus to use only one point makes sense. I got a lot of shots where the AF focused on the cones in the road or a reflective road sign or the sign for a hotel instead of the runner. The third is to check the histogram to make sure the meter isn’t confused.

“I’d do it again”

In the end it was a blast. We even took a pic of Jay, drove his car to the finish line, and took a pic of him again. We learned a lot and we will definitely want to photograph this event again.

For race coverage check out www.amateurendurance.com

The Red Bull Air Races were held May 3^rd and 4^th, 2008 in San Diego California. We were able to attend on the 4^th and take many great pictures. Before the races themselves started there were many side acts and flybys. San Diego is home to many Naval Ships and has a huge military presence. I’ve been to air shows before but none of those compared to this in terms of how close we were to the action and how slow the flybys were. In this photo you can see the heritage flight formation where older aircraft fly side by side with the current generation fighter jets. It’s funny to think that the F-18 will soon be one of the old aircraft too. The first thing you notice here is that the other two planes are propeller driven. The F-18 can fly really slow. How slow? Well so slow you think it’s hovering when you are looking at it from the ground up. The pilot does this by flying at a high angle of attack. The F-18 has the ability to fly at an almost unlimited angle of attack. That means that the wings are pointed up in relation to the air stream and the movement of the aircraft. So why am I telling you all of this? Well of course because the pilot did such a low-speed, high angle of attack flyby. In this photo you can see the pilot tipping the wing right after powering up from the low-speed flyby.

The demonstrations were not limited to fighter jets though. The Coast Guard demonstrated a hoist rescue as you can see in this photo. These helicopters are huge and being underneath one is like being in a small hurricane. I found this out first hand as one flew right by the shore and then leaned left. Jamie’s hat flew about 50 feet.

And last but not least is the crazy maneuver of the Navy divers who hook themselves onto a tether and get pulled out of the water by a seahawk while using no hands. All I have to say is that these guys are nuts! I also wonder how they get down from there. I guess I will never know. Now to the racing itself.

Smoke On!

When the planes prepare to enter the course the air control tells the pilot “smoke on” which tells them to turn on the smoke so the officials can see the flight line and to enter the course. The course is just over 3.5 miles long but it is contained in an area of about 1 square mile. These highly advanced aerobatic prop planes fly at or sometimes over 300 mph. This makes for a very exciting race. The course is defined by a series of air gates. These are conical towers made of a very thin nylon and inflated with air. If a plane collides with a gate it just bursts apart leaving the plane undamaged.

Here you can see what they call the “Quadro” where four air gates are used. The pilots fly through this group of gates twice in two different directions. Since it was so bright outside, shooting these planes was easy… except tracking them was hard. These things moved really, really fast!

Here is a photo of the winner. His name is Paul Bonhomme from Britain and he beat American Mike Mangold in the final by just over a second. See more great shots in the Gallery.

Every year one event brings together excitement and horses and fund raising for a good cause. All the proceeds from each years event goes to the American Cancer Society, the USC Norris Cancer Center, and the Roy and Patricia Disney Cancer Center. The Extravaganza is where the best acts and the most polished Spanish horse breeds are shown off. Photographing this event is challenging. This year we sat in the box seats to get a close look. The Equidome is lit inside but it isn’t bright enough for say ISO 100 film or that setting on a Digital camera. Jamie and I shot ISO 800 film and shot digitally in both 800 and 1600 modes. This was in an effort to keep the shutter speeds above 1/90^th of a second.

All the Excitement

The event is very exciting all the way through. We saw trick riders who rode their horses while hanging off the side of the saddle upside down or while standing on the saddle while using no hands. One of the two trick riders even swung in front of their horse to the other side and got back on. The crazy thing is the horses steer themselves when the riders are doing these tricks. So both horse and rider have to trust each other.

The other exciting thing to see is when the horses are taught to jump straight up in the air from a standstill. This is called a capriole. It’s not something you would see if you’ve been to a thousand horse shows but each year you can see it at the Fiesta. Shooting such an act is difficult as you can imagine. The photographer on the floor of the arena had a powerful strobe. Being in the stands meant not being afforded that option. Therefore we had to rely on a high ISO and a quick response on the shutter. If our camera’s had any shutter lag once the shutter had been pressed we would miss the shot. That is the thing I love about our XT and the Canon A2E I was shooting film with. Both of these cameras have little to no shutter lag.

“Awww, how cute!”

Every year the Fiesta trots out the newborn foals with their mothers. This year one of them was only 5 days old! The reaction of course is unanimous. “Awww, how cute”, is what I hear from the whole audience. Taking this picture wasn’t hard at all. Any shot would do but I think this shot on the right demonstrates the interaction between foal and mare especially well.

I could write on for days about all the wonderful acts you can see at this show. I can’t show them all here though so be sure to head over to the Gallery to check out all the photos. We put them under the Horses category.

Film usage has definitely decreased since digital has become so popular nowadays but it has definitely not died out completely. There are still several places that sell and develop film. Personally, I buy all my film at Samy’s Camera. I have also developed a few rolls there, so as to answer the “who exactly develops film anymore?” question, they do. They also sell all darkroom products, from developing chemicals to photo paper and everything in between.

I decided that I wanted to get a film camera that was similar to the cameras I used in my high school photography class. So it had to be a Pentax SLR and it had to be old. How old you ask? Well the older the better. I found a Pentax Program Plus (circa 1986) on Ebay for about $65, and after a little begging, I got Bryan to buy it for me as an early Valentine’s Day present. Let me tell you, this camera is OLD school; no auto focus, no automatic film advance or rewind, nothing…it was perfect! Well it did have a light meter, for that I am grateful, there’s some things I can’t live without. I also recently purchased a 80-200mm telephoto lens for it via Ebay for $24.99, you can get some really great deals there! To break in my new camera, I went to a local ranch to take some photos of horses (I know, I take a lot of horse pictures) on some old Ilford XP2 400 film. The film was at least 5 years past it’s expiration, however the pictures came out pretty decent. I did take the digital files that I got when I developed the roll at Samy’s and put them into Fireworks to fix the contrast a little. I have to admit the old film had a bit of a gray haze to it. This is something that could have also been fixed in a darkroom with an enlarger, however, I did not have access to one just yet. Here are a few photos that I have shot.  

Another factor that brought on my re-dedication to film was the fact that Bryan and I have decided to go for our photography certification. While Bryan has had just a couple of photography courses in all his time in school, I on the other hand have had many. However, I have decided to start over and enroll with him in a beginning black & white film photography course. I am very anxious to do all this stuff over again, as it was so much fun the first time. I convinced Bryan to get a film camera as well that he can use in this class. He wanted something a little more sophisticated. He wanted a Canon film camera so he could use the lenses we already had for our DSLR. As an early birthday present I purchased him a Canon A2E (circa sometime in the mid 90’s) which included such features as auto focus, the ability to shoot 5 fps and many of the same shooting modes as our DSLR. All for the low price of $85 on Ebay of course. Here are some shots that he took with the same old XP2 400 film.

Shooting with film is a tricky thing. You can’t just shoot with reckless abandon like you do in digital since you only have about 24 shots, so you have to make them count. On top of that, you can’t review the pictures after you’ve taken them, so you have to be aware of your settings at all times. This factor alone has made me a better photographer, I actually have to take the time to set the aperture and shutter speed. I can’t be as spontaneous as I am with my digital. I have to plan the shot, study the conditions and set the camera accordingly because every shot needs to count.

Finally, why did I choose to shoot black & white film over color? Simple, black & white film is by far the easiest and cheapest to develop when doing it yourself. Color processing requires a few more steps and chemicals whereas black & white processing is very straight forward, anybody can do it Most importantly, black & white photography is beautiful, at least I think so. When I look at photographs from years past I just love them. I think I love black & white photography even more than color.

Now the advantages of this method are many. Here are a few of them:

1) You don’t have to run from the camera to the scene

2) If you are the only subject of the photo then now the camera has something to focus on (assuming you don’t set the focus manually in which case you’re out of luck)

3) You can look way more relaxed in the photo

4) You can get great pictures with yourself in them and still get to claim credit for taking the photo as well

 Now using a remote is not without issues. For this remote, since it is infrared, it works via line of sight. I know there are some remote systems that work behind walls/obstructions but those are a little more expensive and your camera has to support it. Other then that it is clear sailing. Look forward to having more photos in your collection that have you in them. I picked my remote up at Samy’s Camera but you can find them anywhere like B&H, Amazon, or NewEgg to name a few of my favorite establishments.