Too Many Choices

Created 27-Feb-25

27 photos

One problem with photographing very skilled racers with very capable cameras and lenses is that the yield of high quality images is very high. As a result, difficult choices must be made when selecting a few images to upload of each racer.

It is only a partial solution to upload more images per skier; the editing and processing time gets completely out of hand. It would be easy (too easy) to simply pick one good photo per racer and upload that one.

Why not? Well, there is a lot of variety to choose from, and I get attached to particular images and don't want them to be unseen forever. So too many are processed and uploaded.

How to choose? The criteria are pretty flexible: good action, good skiing, great focus and technical image quality (although these days that covers about 90% of images taken each day), usually proximity or contact with gates, geometry of the gate when contacted, and a sense of energy, especially in skies (edging and deeply bent is, to me, better). And, ideally, visible goggles and eyes. This can be a factor when racers use a high block or they are in a combination where gates obscure goggles.

I had tried early on, with the Day 1 GS photos, to select and upload only two or three images per racer. That goal was almost immediately discarded: at this skill level, every racer on nearly every gate is doing something photographically and athletically dynamic and interesting, and usually doing it with grace and style. Not much diverging of skis, not much technically deficient. Lots of drama. Mostly just very impressive.

I was usually shooting at 30 frames per second, to give me optimal choices in framing a racer on a gate, for maximum drama and quality. In GS, that means a racer is traveling about two feet between shots. The camera can only process so much information so fast, and then it suddenly stops shooting, so for a while I had to slow it to 15 fps, but that meant racers covered too much distance between shots.

These are technical and aesthetic compromises, so choices must be made.

Just using the women's first run on Day 4 as an example, after I had already selected the images and uploaded them to the race gallery, I went back and looked at the first two racers. It was an arbitrary selection, but that meant I would be reviewing all the run 1 photos I took of Claire Zimmermann and Sara Rask I took 106 photos of Timmermann and 157 of Rask. Both are very skilled racers. (And my photographs of Rask in a RMISA GS two years ago had run in both the Anchorage Daily News and Ski Racing. So I knew what to expect.) And they both did what was expected: produced a lot of photogenically striking race images.

I am attaching in this gallery the outtakes. These are the ones that weren't selected, that didn't make the cut for purely selection reasons, either for the media or the SL women's race gallery. These are all technically sharp. The ones taken farthest awa from me, when racers first started down the final pitch to the finish (where I was on Day 4) are okay, but not technically ideal, mainly because of digital noise. The programs I use can improve such images and I have attached some of those images for reference. But I was also shooting those images at 500mm, full lens extension, and that made processing more time-intensive. It was much better when I first picked images to send to the ADN and then to Ski Racing to avoid anything too time consuming. But when I started selecting for the race gallery on February 25, I reviewed many more possibilities. And then today I revisited all of Zimmermann's and Rask's photos I took on the last day.

So, here are the outtakes.

But mixed in with them are the images that made the final selection. They have red borders. Hard choices. Some choices could have gone either way (for example, #23 of Rask now seems better than #22, and maybe #21 is better, too - skis are more deeply bent; the tradeoff is the gate: better arc in #22).