Photographer's Perspective: Anaheim 3 - Mud Edition

By: Motocross.com

Posted: 02/18/09

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Shooting moto photos in the mud is no fun. Shooting Supercross photos at night while slogging around in the all of the mud that was pushed off the racing surface is downright miserable; and that's not even considering how difficult it is to make good photos.

Simon Cudby came prepared with a raincoat for his gear and himself...

What's so hard about doing good photos at a race like A3? Well, that slogging through the deepest mud thing really is significant. It prevents you from getting where you want to go quickly (or at all), and just the possibility of dropping your $10K worth of camera into that mud makes you very paranoid and careful, further slowing everything down. Of course, add rain to the mix and everything gets exponentially more difficult. At A3, with the heavy rain holding off until late in the 450 Main, it was actually even more of an issue since at that point many of the photogs had left their rain gear for themselves and their gear back in their bags and were stuck with nothing when it hit.

Now for a word about how durable a "Pro" body is. Pro bodies are, for Nikon users, the D2 and D3 series, and for Canon shooters the EOS-1D series, including 1D, 1Ds, Mark 1, 2 and 3. The biggest difference between a pro body and a highp-end consumer model (I'll include the 5D's and anything lower in the lineup for Canon) is the amount of weatherproofing and general abuse the body can take while remaining functional. It's literally amazing how much a 1D series body can put up with and, to be honest, I've never personally experienced the limits of it. I've stood in pouring rain on the hills of Pennsylvania for two days, and on the floor of San Francisco's AT&T Park for many hours with no protection whatsoever over the body and lens (300 2.8) and have not had any trouble. The flashes are the real weak point, as are lenses that aren't rated as being weather-proof: A non weatherproofed lens on a pro body will render the body NON waterproof, so keep that in mind.

So, how do we make nice photos at a mud race? Well, we try a lot harder to produce a lot fewer real beauties, that much is for sure. It's tricky with a lot of mud on the bikes, since the usual amount of flash really makes the mud seem almost worse than it actually is (I've included a sample below). The other alternative is to shoot with just ambient light, although the mud-covered portions of the bike tend to really make the camera want to overexpose the shot (hence slowing the shutter speed way down for those not shooting in manual mode), which makes manual exposures key. It's really a damned if you do, damned if you don't deal, so often you end up settling on a blend of the two – an ISO high enough that allows the ambient light to have more of an impact, while throwing just enough flash to light up the deep, dark shadows and pop what little color is left of the bikes and riders. Another tricky part about the mud is all of it that is flying around in the air from bikes other than the one you're shooting at. The autofocus is so good on cameras these days that it will pick up on a clump of mud coming between you and your subject and re-focus on that, making the subject fall out of focus – even if just a little bit. The solution, at least for Canon users, is to slow down how quickly AF picks up on a ‘new' subject (that clump of mud). You can do this by a simple switch in the menu system on the camera. Yet another tricky deal is when the rain is actively falling from the sky. Guess what? The rain is something else for the camera to focus on, and you bet it does, making in-focus riders and bikes a relative rarity once the rain falls. Oh and flash? Forget about it. There's nothing cool or artsy about lighting up a whole bunch of water and the subject you're trying to portray in a good light.

Ambient light worked great in this shot. Had this been hit with flash, all you'd notice is the mud... 1/600th, F/2.8, ISO800

When all else fails in crummy conditions, break all the rules and throw out some wacky settings to see what comes out of it... 1/10th, F/9, ISO100