Created 29-Mar-20
245 photos
Racing Close-Ups. This gallery is intended to share what I have the privilege of seeing on my computer screen when I enlarge or crop my race photos. It is an arbitrary collection of closely cropped race images from the 2019-20 ski season that just ended prematurely. I hope you enjoy the images as much as I did making them and processing them.
Photographing ski racing allows me to combine two passions, photography and ski racing. A modern camera, especially with a long lens, can see and retain what the unaided human eye cannot. An eye blink lasts about a third of a second. Unless I am purposely shooting with a slow shutter speed, I normally use shutter speeds of at least 1/2000th of a second, and preferably 1/3200th, light permitting. These exposures last only 1/700th to 1/1000th as long an eye blink. So the camera can grab other-wise hidden subtle and momentary details of what is happening on course at the moment of image capture. One of the pleasures of shooting ski racing is the ability to see these tiny and fleeting details, such as the deflection when a pole or shin guard hits a gate or the interaction between ski edge and snow.
But ultimately this sport is about humans confronting the challenges of a technically and physically difficult sport. And the ultimate highlight for me is being able to see on a big desktop screen how racers are coping with these inherent challenges. When cropped to emphasize the racers and their expressions, these images are a form of portraiture. They are portraits of athletes in action.
Their expressions range from surprise to determination to stoic endurance. Not every racer is a drama major on course; most are pretty stoic most of the time, even when things get wild (losing a pole, or a glove, or having one ski bounce up to chest height) or snow squalls move through, obscuring goggles and gates.
Most adults justifiably admire how young racers fluidly meet those challenges. But even knowledgeable spectators with great eyesight have trouble assessing the gross motor skills of a ski racer, especially one moving at 44 feet per second (i.e., 30 miles per hour, the GS speed of many U14s), much less discerning facial expressions and little details. And safety requires significant spectator-racer separation. Even greater separation distance is required for a speed race.
Especially when I am trying to photograph every racer, I can't specialize in close-ups. And even with long lenses I can’t safely get close enough for extreme close-ups, especially in GS and SG races. So this after-the-fact portraiture usually means significant, even extreme, cropping of image files, magnifying any technical photographic deficiencies. Extreme close-ups are even harder in bad shooting conditions. And even the best cameras can lose focus; this happened during the season several times, causing me to miss a few racers altogether; sometimes the result is more subtle, but not quite sharp enough for prime time. And there is a lot of motion on course; even at 1/3200th, heads move enough to make details a little less sharp.
This is a selection of on-course portraits of Alyeska Ski Club and UAA racers taken during this ski season. The selection is pretty arbitrary. In a perfect world, every racer would have one or two images in this gallery, but with 72,000-some images from just this season, I can't work my way back through every start list. Plus, some images are better technically than others (sharper, better exposed) and depict more interesting details. And some skiing is more athletic or more aesthetic, leading to multiple images for some racers in a given race.
Finally, because the images are often significantly cropped, image quality may be sufficiently compromised that large files and prints will not be satisfactory. So if anyone does try to purchase one of these images, there are size limits on the files and prints. They will almost always make excellent 6x9 prints, but many will not look good at 8x12. So I’ve limited all of them. If someone seriously wants a bigger file or print, email me and I’ll check to see what might work. Ultimately, though, I don’t want my name on either low-quality or boring race pictures. A high-res digital file will look good on a big screen at maybe 6x9; larger it will start to break up.
If anyone feels left out, especially graduating U19s, I'll look to see if there is anything suitable to add to this collection. Just tell me which races you were in, ideally with dates.
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