Sportograf’s jobs aren’t the most creative ones, even though some interesting pics come always out. The goal is to provide each participant a good amount of good pictures, so that they bring home some good memories of his/her epic achievement. This translates in having one/two spots during the event, and shooting each and every participant in more or less the same way. Most often, shooting like this is an endurance challenge itself, because it involves very long days and very long waits on the spot, form the first person to the very last one.
August 2023, Vichy (FR): the perfect opportunity for improving composition
However, this doesn’t mean it’s boring. On the contrary, it can be very helpful to work on specific skills, such as finding the perfect angle and background, or learning to foresee the changes in lights: when you are shooting a U-turn for 10 hours, light changes dramatically and can make or brake a picture. Even when you have to shoot on a highway and actually make pictures look cool, it’s a very interesting challenge.
The same way some limit due to the context can be the perfect opportunity to improve technically, it can also be a great opportunity to work on the storytelling. At the Ironman Vichy, I worked mainly on improving composition, which was very interesting with such limited freedom. I needed 90-degrees pictures, allowing IronMan riders to show off their amazing bikes in aero position. This was the goal, nothing more, nothing less. So, my creative effort could focus on the choice of focal lenght and of the background.
What follows is a chronicle of that day’s journey trying and improving composition, including a few mistakes of various sorts. We were a team of 8, and shot more than 50000 pcitures, therefore mine is a very limited point of view.
Final output
From 8.30 am to 6pm I shot almost 4000 pics, an average of 5 pictures for each rider (the riders did 2 laps). The first rider finished the cycling section (180km with 2500m elevation) by midday, while the last ones were sweeped up at 6pm. I shooted mainly in M and S priority with high shutter speed (1/2000 to 1/4000), always with AUTO iso, which oscillated between 200 and 800 through the day.
Disclaimer
As this is the standard policy, all pictures are JPEG-only. This means absolutely zero postproduction: no crops, no adjustments at all. You have to get it right in-camera.
Finally, pictures!
At first, I started by shooting riders against an open background, trying to include a fair bit of sky to show the height of the hill and to have a clean background and underscore the subject. Here’s 2 shots.
The pics are OK, but I wasn’t really satisfied. So I tried something different, including something to give a bit of context. Unfortunately, it was impossible to put in the frame the road signs with the village name. So I tried with a wood fence to remind the countryside atmosphere. It also added some dynamic working as “rails” behind the rider.
I liked the fence, but I wasn’t satisfied with the sky: it was always barely visible in a corner, and I wanted either to exclude it completely or to include more of it. But from my point of view it was very hard, so I tried to look for a more “minimal” composition: road, bike, simple background. But the picture – see below – was too tight, especially under and over the rider.
So I got a bit back to have more context, but keeping it simple/minimal:
Tarmac, rider, trees, sky; the elements were there, but the rider had to be on the right, to give him more room in front of the bike; more like this:
I was on the right path. Of course, among so many pictures, a few were missed shots, usually because of dumb mistakes on my side. A few examples:
You can see my beautiful foot covering part of the grass. I was lowering almost to the ground to find the right layering – sometimes too low.
A few times, focus did not work. 99% my mistake, only 1% because of hunting.
I wanted to keep the picture tight on the subject, but this meant cutting those not riding on aero bars. Too bad :/
In this case, I pushed the AEL/AFL button by mistake, bringing me to C2 mode – which is for panning, so very low shutter speed. I turned off the button to prevent this to happen again, and I will restore it before next job.
While shooting, I tried to stand up and then to lay down, looking for a good angle. Eventually, I decided to include a small part of grass on the lower part to add a bit of depth to the frame: this way, foreground, subject and background are clearly separated.
A very small line of grass is enough. Also, the fairly clean background with this green pines, very homogeneous, worked well to give a dynamic zest to the picture.
Eventually, an effective composition
Now it was time to (try to) combine all these elements: after all, improving composition is about trying again and again :
- grass in the foreground
- homogeneous forest in the background
- no sky, or a meaning part of sky
- good position of the rider in the frame (on the right side, going toward the left)
In this case, it worked well with a green/on/green palette.
Of course, this worked even better when there was some contrast with the cyclist, as it is here where a cloud made the trees even darker and the rider a bit brighter.
This concept seems to works well with any color, even black and white riders; of course, with red/orange riders the constrast was even starker.
Even without a visible contrast, the green background – it was a green box, or frame for the rider – needed only a small detail to do its work: see for example the bright blue helmet in this otherwise flat image:
In some pictures, I have been lucky enough with the various lines in the frame. In these 2 examples the riders are within the green trees; sometimes, the back and the head of the rider crossed the tree line, giving some extra power to the shot. The white-ish sky is not bothering, since the rider is also black&white.
I think this is one of the nicest shots, due to a few elements: the out-of-focus grass adds depth; the rider is riding hard and the position testifies to that, helped by the line of trees; there is enough sky but not too much. To sum up, I like it, especially because of the intertwining lines of the rider and the wood against the sky, which gives more movement to the frame. It was good enough. The quest for a better composition was over. Of course, this didn’t mean I kept trying other perspectives; but I had something good to hold on and to start from.
Improving composition: a couple more shots
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