BamaCross #2 was yet again an amazing race. Being the second race in the series and my 3rd race overall I am still learning a few things. The main lesson from this race was if you get lapped with 2 laps to go you now only have 1 lap. That mistake cost me a position at the line. Oh well, something to keep in mind for the next race. I will do a full race report on my Tumblr page of my performance.

The course was not only great to race but great to photograph. I kicked myself the first race for not bringing my camera to screw around and get a little practice in. It’s very easy to access many of the key spots of the race and with many of them being a little back in the woods I wouldn’t have to fight the light too much.

Everyone seemed to have a great time and really enjoyed the race. There were many opportunities for me to capture both pain and smiles. I hope you enjoy the images. If your newcomer to my site cruise around, you might like what you see.

And this is a little something I made. It popped in my head when I was editing this photo.

As some of you may know there are about to be a few changes in our household. No we are not having kids and no we did not get engaged (yet), we are moving. With the big move marks a big leap in my life professionally, I am starting my own company. It will be a gradual transition but with any luck I will be able to support ourselves on this project alone. In the meantime I will continue working in the restaurant field until the photography thing really gets going.

This is really exciting for me and something I have always dreamed about. I have always wanted to work for myself and to create a business from the bottom up. I hope you will join me in this endeavor and lend any advice you might have along the way.

While the site is not fully built yet, here is an idea of what it is going to look like. I am building it in to be iPhone/iPad friendly using only HTML, CSS, and some Javascript.

These are my images from the US Pro Cycling Road Race for this year. I am only a few weeks late but hey, better late than never. This year the race was held in May rather than September, giving the now former US Champ Ben King a short reign as the US champion. They moved the race over the holiday weekend hoping to attract more viewers and give the riders a rest day between the time trial and road race.

One thing that stood out in my mind of the race was that it was HOT! I mean like mid summer hot. By the time the race was over, less than half of the riders who started the race crossed the finish line. Everyone was dropping like flies, including myself. I made the poor decision to leave the morning of the race from Auburn, which meant I left at the crack of dawn. Ad to the fact that I had spent pretty much the entire month before traveling, I was pretty exhausted both mentally and physically.

I arrived to Paris Mnt a little late which meant I was riding my bike up. I maintained a good pace all the way up, passing a few roadies on my mountain bike with 20lbs of weight on my back. I was caught out by the caravan about 3/4 of the way to the summit where I shot the riders for their first go up Paris Mnt.

After the field passed I began to think that I wasn’t 100% on my game and it turned out that I wasn’t. As proof I included my images of the finish line. It would have been an awesome picture if the riders had been in focus and NOT the hands, a simple mistake that cost an important shot. I was still able to get some good shots but I made some pretty basic mistakes throughout the day, wasting some good opportunities. Mistakes I wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t been so tired. But that’s the way the photography biz goes and you have to push through it.

One part I was particularly pleased with was continuing on my success of shoot with a prime lens. I really enjoyed how some of the images turned out from the work I did for Sunny King this year. So I picked out a pretty shady spot on one of the steeper sections of the climb and slapped my 50mm on. Leaving the aperture at 2 I wanted to capture some detailed images of the riders as the made their way up as well as take advantage of the low depth of field. The pictures I shot with the 50 (that were in focus) turned out to be some of my favorite of the day. I felt like it gave a very intimate feel to the race. Which if you have ever been to a race you know they are very intimate,  with the action happening only feet away from you.

As always I hope you enjoy the images. Thanks and take care!

Even though wedding photography is my primary money maker I don’t get to feature any of the work I do on my blog. All the wedding work I do is through the studio I work for, so all my work is featured there. Fortunately, this time around it was a little different. On top of being a member of the bridal party I was asked to take a few pictures at my friends Mike and Krystal’s wedding. There was nothing more I would want to do for some of my best friends than help them remember their wedding day years on down the road.

The whole day was centered around the butterfly garden in St. Louis, Missouri. On top of their being a butterfly garden they had a park which had a number of old buildings and large grassy areas that were amazing to use as a back drop. It was one of those type of places that, as a wedding photographer, you would go nuts over. Sadly I don’t have a ton of images of the buildings because they were used for the group shots and, as a member of the bridal party, I was in the picture. Once I have a link to the other photographers pictures I will gladly link them here.

I hope you enjoy the photographs. I was happy to be a part of their day. They are such a great couple and I think it really shows in the pictures.

This year for the Sunny King Criterium I went about things a little differently, partly out of necessity and partly out of challenging myself to step out of my comfort zone. This year I shot with one camera and one lens, the Nikkor 35mm 1.8/f fixed focal length lens to be exact. I decided upon this challenge because I was unable to source another camera and I never got around to renting some additional lenses. Plus the fact that I didn’t have a client to shoot for opened up the ability to work a little differently and experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.

More often than not I kept the aperture pretty wide open, giving me a small depth of field. When photographing cycling that is often times not what you would want to do. Since the subject is moving so quickly you would rather have a wide depth of field in order to ensure your subject would stay in focus.

Now I will admit that I had quite a few out of focus pictures due to the small depth of field but the images that were sharp turned out to be really good. They had nice depth and some even gave a good since of atmosphere to the images. They turned out different than what I normally shot for criteriums, which I liked.

As far as the actual day goes it was a good day for bike racing. The sky was clear and it was not extremely hot. The races were much more exciting than last year. I spent most of my day walking around with my buddy Brandon Andrews who was shooting for multiple clients that day. Be sure to head over to his site and check out his images as well. My only complaint, and I’m not sure why it turned out that way, was that the field for the womens race seemed very small. The field was about half of last years Twilight, and probably lacking 10 riders from the previous Sunny King.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the images. Let’s hope it is not a few more months before I get around to making a new blog post.