June 20th-21st 2023 - Pearce DH @ Rhyd y Felin

I spent the weekend photographing bikes. Here’s a recap of my weekend’s actions, camera settings, and problems.

Friday: Driving and Arriving

(above) The Route

Immediately after a two-and-a-half-hour university exam on environmental physiology (I talk about this stuff more on my fitness website’s blog), I got home, packed the last of my kit, and set off for Rhyd Y Felin to photograph some bikes at the first Pearce Cycles DH event of the season. It was just shy of a three-hour drive, but a pleasant one. As I’d set off quite late in the day, I got to watch the sunset as I drove through mid-Wales. I also regretted not packing my 150-600mm for some wildlife photography, as I saw buzzards, red kites, and even a grouse (those things off the whiskey bottles) as I got near the race venue.

I arrived at the campsite (a field that the organizers use to host all the riders and, in my case, photographers over the race weekend) at around 10 pm. After a relatively long drive, I had some cereal and retired for the night in my van. I’m glad I took earplugs as mountain bikers, apparently, aren’t the quietest bunch. Annoyingly, however, I did fail to pack any sort of sleeping mask, and the headlights of later arrivals to the campsite came beaming through my van windows.

Saturday: Practice

For those of you unfamiliar with mountain bike events, race weekends typically consist of a practice day on Saturday for riders to familiarise themselves with the course via a track walk and a fair number of untimed practice runs down the course, before the actual racing is done on the Sunday.

I find practice days can often be better for photographing near jumps, as riders are much more relaxed and, upon noticing a photographer in their hi-vis jacket, more likely to do a bar turn or whip.

Sidenote: a very good whip often makes for a cool photo, but can also hide the rider’s race number on the front of their bike and make tagging the photo more difficult later.

(Above) showing off for the camera. 1/1250s, f/5.6, ISO 800

Across the practice day, I walked most of the way up the 2.4km track. Having photographed at the same venue last year, I didn’t venture above marshal number 4 as I remember there not being many good photo opportunities at the very top.

My camera spent most of the practice day focusing via face detect AF, which worked surprisingly well considering all riders were wearing full-face helmets and often goggles. In busier shots with some branches and bluebells in the foreground, I switched between horizontal zone, vertical zone, or just regular zone autofocus depending on how the rider was expected to move through the shot.

*I had a specific issue using horizontal zone AF for one particular shot on race day and didn’t realize why until afterward. More on that later.

I played around with various shutter speeds and apertures throughout the day, usually staying above 1/640th and f/5.6, respectively, as there was plenty of sunlight to work with. The exceptions to these were shots taken in a particularly dark section of the forest where I opened the apertures of both my 24-70 and 70-200mm lenses to f/2.8, although the ISOs still ended up being a little high for my liking and I soon made my way back to the daylight.

(above) a shot in that rather dark forest. 1/500s, f/2.8, ISO 4000

As enjoyable as it is to work in nice weather, kicking about in shorts and a t-shirt, I’m not a fan of the harsh lighting that results from bright sunlight.

Regarding burst speeds

My Canon R6 can shoot up to 20 photos per second via the electronic shutter. This is nice for my wildlife photography and private sports work when I only have to photograph a handful of riders, the fast burst lets me get the most out of the action and helps capture the “perfect” moment.

However, this would be far from practical for shooting a race all day. I used the mechanical shutter on high-speed continuous (rather than the faster “high speed+” which is 12fps). I don’t know exactly what fps this setting gave me, but at a guess I would say 7 or 8fps.

I still ended up with around 2,500 shots from practice day alone and another 3,000 from race day. Now Imagine if I’d been on 20fps.

Storing, handling, editing and uploading that many images would be near impossible. Especially given the race to get your photos up on Roots and Rain as soon as possible.

Around 4 pm the practice runs were coming to an end and I made my way back to my van. Without a laptop fast enough to edit so many photos, I flicked through my shots on the camera itself and deleted any obviously bad ones (e.g. out of focus or cropping the riders’ heads off on jumps) and planned on editing when I got home to my much faster PC.

Phone signal or 4G/5G is a rare commodity in North Wales, so, having found a pub in the nearby village that had Wi-Fi, myself and two of my photographer friends Calvin and Lexxi headed off there. Calvin and Lexxi had also photographed the practice day and, unlike me, had nice fast laptops on which they could edit their shots on and then upload them in the pub.

I have since upgraded to a faster Razer laptop that I’m using at this moment to write this. It seems to run Lightroom extremely fast, but I am yet to test it with thousands of images.

Sunday: Race Day

Having slept well enough for a second night in my van, I got up and ready in time for Sunday’s extra practice runs which started at 8:30 am. I made a near-fatal error by leaving my van without grabbing new, fully charged, batteries to keep in my bag.

Walking up the track again, I noticed some potential for photos in some corners. Calvin pointed out, quite correctly, that those same spots would probably look much better later in the day as they wouldn’t be so backlit. I eventually set up by a corner where the dust kicked up by riders was highlighted by this backlighting, I thought it was quite cool.

After sitting there for a while, I moved up to a favorite spot of mine on the Rhyd Y Felin course, where riders have the option to weave between two tree stumps or jump the second. I had also collected a fair few shots on this feature on practice day, so come 11 am and the timed runs began, I moved back down to the earlier, dust-loving spot.

(above) The tree stumps. This guy took the “up and over” route. 1/1000s, f/5.6, ISO 500

Now let’s talk about that problem with the horizontal zone AF, as that wasn’t the issue itself. Keeping the camera still by resting it on my backpack, I set it to a horizontal zone due to how the riders were moving through the frame. Using back-button AF and pressing it only when riders came into view, the AF occasionally locked onto another point within the horizontal zone.

(above) The dusty corner shot. Riders entered from the right-hand side of the image. The red box roughly represents the horizontal AF area. 1/800s, f/5.6, ISO 500

What was the actual issue here? I had my autofocus settings to continue tracking a subject and ignore possible obstacles, meaning that the camera often mistook the trees in the background as the subject, and the rider passing through as an obstacle. Instead, I should have had it set to focus on subjects suddenly entering AF points, as that’s exactly what was happening in that section of the course. Live and learn.

Eventually, I felt as though I’d taken enough shots there, you have to keep moving so that riders have a variety of shots of themselves when they look online. My next spot had also been eyed up the day before. I aimed to get a nice patch of bluebells in the foreground of the image. Does it distract from the action of mountain biking? Perhaps so. But I think they’re nice.

The bluebells are mostly bokeh’d out of focus anyway.

1/800, f/8, ISO 2500

The Way Home: Disaster

Remember that bit about how photographers race to get their images uploaded ASAP?

Do you also remember how, as of the time of this race, I didn’t have a laptop fast enough to edit photos on and needed to get home to my PC?

Well, about 40 minutes into my 3-hour drive home, right after a Marty Robins song had finished. My dashboard turned into a disco floor as I took a right-hand bend, with a distinct “STOP” message. So I pulled into the nearest layby and phoned my chief mechanical advisor (my dad) who then advised me to phone my breakdown cover provider.

This was all at about 7:15 pm. I dialed the AA and was on hold for about 10 minutes before I spoke to a reassuring guy that told me, as I was in the literal middle of nowhere, that they would be with me at 9:55 pm. Two hours wasn’t ideal, but it was bearable.

Then it got delayed. 3:55 am was the new time. So, annoyed, I got a few hours of sleep in my van. I woke up to my 3:50 am alarm and waited for a bit before calling the AA to see what was up.

I was delayed again. Eventually, a nice guy called Andy rocked up in the recovery truck at about 7 am, loaded my van up, and chatted with me for the remaining two-hour drive to drop my van off at a garage near my house.

Thanks, Andy.

When I got home, some 12 hours later than planned, I could begin editing, uploading, and tagging my photos. It was all done at about 6 pm Monday.

Despite this delay, I’ve still managed to make most of the photo sales I did at the same event last year. Had I got them up earlier, I might’ve been on for a stormer. There’s always next year.

In summary, it was an eventful weekend. Despite breaking down it was a great few days of photographing a great event in the sunshine and the company of old and new friends.