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.

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