BMX Craziness

Whew! It's been a busy week for me. I hate missing a day of posting to the blog, let alone two. I've finished sorting through the roughly 1100 "action" shots I took at the Bicycle Expo & Swap presented by rideSFO. These kids were amazing on their bikes. My main goal was to capture their athleticism. Whenever possible I wanted to illustrate or even exaggerate how far off the ground they got. I also wanted to show how much fun they and the crowd were having. The main technical challenge was the overall darkness of the convention hall. In these shots, I wanted to freeze the moment, which meant that my exposure time had to be very brief (1/200 to 1/320 seconds). To compensate, I pushed my ISO up to 800 and beyond, which introduced more grain into the photos. I also opened up my aperture to its max of f/2, but that reduced the depth of field, thus it gave me less leeway if the subject was out of focus. After all this trouble, I still had to increase the fill light and/or overall exposure level in Lightroom. All this begs the question, why didn't I use a flash? I thought about it, but I didn't want to distract the kids and God forbid cause them to lose their balance and break a leg or worse. I also didn't want to ruin the experience for the spectators around me. Overall, I really enjoyed this shooting opportunity. I got a chance to get very close to them and even risked getting hurt if things went wrong, but it was all worth it. I don't have any other photos in my collection that come close to these types of shots. Good times. I have about 500 "non-action" shots to review and then I'll be done. I'll chat about some of them in the coming days.