Skiing Shoot

Canon EOS 7D, 500mm f4L, f4.0, 1/500th second, ISO 400, Exposure compensation: +0.17, tripod mounted.

An acquaintance of mine, an Olympic hopeful in cross-country skiing asked me to take some photos of him this weekend. He was looking for some decent looking action shots to send to his sponsors and get printed into posters to hand out at races. As it turns out, there is a lot more to going for the Olympics than just training and being fast on skis. There is a lot networking, and creating buzz.

So I met Tyson Flaharty and his wive Davya on Saturday afternoon. It was overcast which made for less than dramatic lighting, but at least the exposure was easy to judge without the sunlight creating too much contrast. There are a few hurdles to this kind of work. First it was reasonably cold, with the mercury sitting right around zero. That means that my batteries would not hold their charge nearly as long as on a warm day. To compensate for that I often pulled the battery out of the camera and put it in my pocket when we were moving from spot to spot, or as I was waiting for Tyson to get ready for another shoot.

The second issue with the cold is that, once outside, I couldn't take my equipment back indoors until the end of the shoot. Why? you ask. Simple: condensation. Just like a cold glass of beer sweating in a hot room, had I taken my cold camera and lenses indoors they would have fogged up and frosted over like an ice cube. (Tip: You can put your equipment in a plastic ziplock bags to keep this from happening, if you ever need to go in and out a lot during a cold shoot).

The last hurdle was the shoot itself. As I already mentioned the lighting was flat, but easy to expose for. I pushed the exposure about a stop to bring the snow to near white, but retaining texture and keeping texture in Tyson's black clothes. I nailed almost every exposure, it was easy. I shot primarily two lenses, my 70-200 f2.8L, and my 500mm f4L. We were shooting on forested ski trails so making Tyson pop out from the background required a very shallow depth of field. I shot wide open at ISO 400. I think I had better success with the 500 because of its extremely narrow depth of field. the background in the image above blurs nicely. It retains enough information to see that it is forest, but not enough to distract from Tyson.

Skiing, as any fast-paced sport is tough to shoot. Focus distances are constantly shifting and getting sharp images requires a fast autofocus and/or perfect timing. The 7D did well in this regard, it kept up with Tyson as he accelerated toward me and most shots are sharp. The image quality at ISO 400 suffered somewhat, a bit noisy which reduced some sharpness, but the results are acceptable.

As winter is here with a vengeance (it is now -22F as I write this) there will likely be more of this kind of thing to come. Mushing and ski season are underway!