Recent Work and Current Projects

Image of the day for Saturday 2 November. I made this image on the slopes of Ester Dome, just west of Fairbanks. The sun was rising and tall birches were capped with frost. 

As winter rolls in, it’s increasing difficult to stay inspired. New projects are a great way to keep up the creativity. This month, I’m embarking on couple such things. The first is a daily image project. November has arbitrarily been named National Photo Posting Month (#NaPhoPoMo) and I’ve decided to participate. Every day during the month of November I’ll be creating and sharing a new image. Most will end up here, and all will appear on my Facebook feed. I often go through dry spells with my photography, in which I’ll go weeks without picking up the camera. This project is my effort to fend off that kind of apathy.

The second is a more formal personal project. One of my favorite things to do in the winter in Fairbanks is ride fat-tired mountain bikes. It keeps me sane. Fat-biking is one of the fastest growing segements of the cycling industry and it was born right here in Alaska. What better place to document the sport, it’s racers, and the culture that surrounds winter cycling? So this winter, I’m planning on creating an entire series on Fat-biking. I’ll be making a variety of images from races, to formal portraits of riders, to more commercial-oriented work. Saturday was the first race of the season, so I showed up with my camera to make a few images. All the biking photos here were made on Saturday morning.

Here are some of my recent work, and some information on each:

Image of the day for Sunday 3 November. The afternoon had turned gray when I finally got out for a walk with the camera. There is just a dusting of snow on the ground and I thought the gray weather and light snow suited a sepia-toned black and white. Used this leaning spruce as a tight foreground with a 14mm lens and left enough of the background to provide a sense of context.

This is my friend Kevin. He is one of the top winter bike racers in the country, and has the endurance and speed of someone possessed. This is a guy who can ride literally hundreds of miles without sleep or rest. Here I photographed him coming out of a turn on a narrow single-track trail during Saturday’s race.

Here is Kevin early in the race. The morning sun rising through the birches, and I wanted that to be part of the image. The problem is that to avoid blowing out the sunrise, I needed a fast shutter speed, which would have made the rider a silhouette. The solution? Throw in some flash. I used an off-camera flash handheld with my left hand as I single-handed the camera with my right. (A little cumbersome, but it worked). I put a full cut of CTO gel (Color Temperature Orange) over the flash to match the orange light from the sunrise, and <pop>. Almost looks natural.

This image is from the race start. There were only about 15 riders and this guy was one of the last out of the gate. I was shooting straight into the rising sun and using flash for most of the shots of the passing riders, but on this one, the flash was recharging and failed to fire. It sort of worked anyway.

This is my friend Jay winding his way along the course. I’d picked a good spot in the trees above the trail, looking to create an image that showed some of the context: the tightly packed birches and the riders winding through. I had stepped down to adjust my flash when Jay surprised me. I dashed up into the trees and managed to snap this with a 70-200. It wasn’t from exactly the right location so he is partially obscured by the branches, and yet I still like it. When I get around to shooting some fat-biking images with riders who aren’t racing, I’ll have to pursue this idea further. That’s the thing with photography, if you find an image that ALMOST works, it’s great inspiration to figure out how to make it perfect. The challenge is then making the opportunity to execute it. Actually, I think that is one of the major differences between good photographers and great ones. Great ones take what they learned, and repeat until they get it right. I know I can take that lesson to heart.

Related posts: