Seb Rogers: mountain bike photography

dSLRs come of age

With a few days of Alpine riding (and a stack of pictures) under my belt, I've had a bit of time to digest the impact of Nikon's new dSLR offerings. My pre-order for the D300 is already in; the only thing I'm not sure about until it's arrived is whether it'll be replacing the D200 or the D2X (which reminds me, later this year one of those cameras will be up for sale... one careful owner, etc.).

dSLRs are different beasts from their old film counterparts for three reasons. First, their design both defines and limits the image quality of which they're capable (you could change the appearance and technical quality of your film photos simply by loading a roll of the latest emulsion into your xx-year-old SLR). Second, they've traditionally been more expensive than film SLRs, particularly at the pro end (this is a significant factor for anyone with an interest in using cameras as part of their business, because a dSLR is a capital expense that can't be fully offset against tax). And third, dSLR lifecycles have been shorter than their film equivalents (a pro film SLR typically wouldn't be updated for 5-8 years, whereas pro dSLRs are on a 2-3 year refresh cycle. So that's both more, and more frequent, capital expense).

Although the D3 is getting a lot of the attention, it's the D300 that I think is particularly interesting. On the first point, it promises to at least match the D2X on image quality (this, in case you're wondering, is a Good Thing. The D2X is my benchmark for clean, accurate and detail-filled files - it's noticeably, if only slightly, better than the D200 in this respect). And it's going to achieve that - along with some worthwhile performance and useability hops like higher frame rates and better AF - at a price that's about the same as Nikon's closest-equivalent semi-pro film SLR from a few years ago, the F100. Which blows the second point out of the water, and should give Canon something to think about (although the 1DIII offers some advantages over the D300, it's out-resolved by the Nikon, matched or exceeded in spec in most other areas and costs twice as much).

So in two respects, at least, the D300 represents a welcome watershed in dSLR design. The D200 was the first camera that persuaded me that good digital performance didn't have to mean a second mortgage; the D300 simply takes that process to its logical conclusion. It's not so much a stripped-down D3, but a fully-featured pro camera in its own right at a price that should have the competition running back to the drawing board.

But that third point - short product lifecycles - doesn't look like going away, and that presents pro photographers with a problem that simply didn't exist in the days of film. How do you pay for more frequent capital expenses that also depreciate more quickly... and all against the backdrop of image over-supply and falling rates?

Answers on a new 14-24mm f/2.8, to be left (carefully) by my back door, please...

Four eyes

I didn't find my glasses. But I did get lots of pictures like this, which almost (but not quite) makes up for looking like an extra from Mad Max for the next few days.

Nikon D200, 12-24mm f/4, 1/320 sec f/8 @ ISO100

Mountain amnesia

I spent 10 hours in the saddle today scouting locations for a four-day shoot in the French Alps.

Nikon D40X, 50-150mm f/2.8, 1/400 sec f/5.6 @ ISO100

This is one of the places we'll be going back to re-shoot... partly because I managed to leave my glasses somewhere near here.

I've been spending the past few hours stumbling around in the dark in my prescription Adidas shades looking like a fourth-rate Bono impersonator. Someone pointed out a few minutes ago that I could slip out the dark lenses and leave the prescription insert attached to the frame. Which is true. I now feel a bit less like Stevie Wonder... but look even weirder (you'd think it'd be impossible to look weirder than Bono, but trust me, I've managed to do it).

I'm really (really) hoping that my glasses are currently on a grassy ledge enjoying a jaw-dropping starlit view, and that I'll be reunited with them tomorrow morning...

Mine's bigger than yours

Wow. And wow.

Whilst I'm a great believer in the principle that the person behind the camera is more important than any quantity of clever technology, the latent gear freak in me is mightily impressed with Nikon's new D3 and D300. On paper, at least.

Let's see. D3: full frame, 12 megapixels, 9 frames per second, 51 point AF with colour-based subject recognition (!)... and this comes in at just 10% more than the asking price for Canon's ground-breaking 1.3x, 10mp, 10fps 1DmkIII. It's rather like a much, much faster full frame D2X with a bunch of other cool stuff thrown in. Yes, it's expensive. But it's also all the camera most photographers will ever need.

Or there's the D300: 1.5x, 12 megapixels, 6-8 frames per second, the same 51 point AF module and most of the D3's other innovations in a package the size and weight of the already excellent D200, for 1/3 (yep, you read that right) of the price of the D3. Which, come to think of it, is rather like a faster D200 with more pixels and...

You get the idea. No new flash system, and no live histograms. But lots of useful-sounding new features, and a big hop-up in terms of speed.

If money were no object, I'd take one of each, just for the faster frame rate. Time to dust off my 'how to rob a bank and not get caught' plans.

Day in the life: cover shoot

6:40am - wake-up call, courtesy of my 2 1/2 year old daughter. Open curtains to warm, low sun... and a menacing-looking bank of cloud on the horizon. I packed most of the car last night, so after breakfast it's a quick round-up of bodies, lenses, batteries, flashes, tripods and memory cards before heading out.

9:05am - meet Robin, the mag's art ed, on the edge of town. He's brought a bunch of spare kit and helmets, just in case (you never quite know what riders will turn up wearing, and it's surprising how a grotty old helmet or clashing socks can ruin a shot). As we drive towards south Wales the good weather disappears over the eastern horizon, to be replaced by the incoming front and light, persistent rain. Perfect cover shoot conditions.

10:40am - after a quick breakfast top-up stop at (sshhh) Maccy D's, we meet cover star Rowan at the trailhead carpark. Er, except it turns out we're not using this trail. The spot Robin had in mind - which he chose after seeing a photo taken on another shoot, by another photographer - is a few miles down the road. And up a rocky dirt track, on which I try not to bottom out my sump...

11:15am - it's still raining, so we park the cars and head down the trail on foot for 5 minutes to look at our chosen location. The trail is perfect - narrow, natural singletrack running along the top of a tree-lined ridge. Robin's rooty corner looks great, if a tiny bit tame. Rowan's going to have to turn on some extra style to make the shot work, but I'm confident he's up to the task. With no sign of the rain clearing, we decide to get ready and wait it out if necessary.

12:30pm - we're about 20 shots into the shoot, and the weather's playing tricks with us. Although the rain's eased to the point where it's not really a problem, there's a fair bit of mist rolling over our ridge. The thing is, it's both patchy and fast-moving. Several times I give Rowan the all-clear to start riding, but by the time he's rolled the 50 yards to our rooty corner the mist has got there first. The misty pics are atmospheric and moody, but they're unlikely to make the cover. We've got no choice but to keep waiting and watching, and try to time each run so that it's mist-free.

2:15pm - I've got over 50 shots in the can, of which all but a few are technically fine. It's a slow and painstaking process, because I can only get a single shot on each run. More importantly, both Robin and I reckon there's a good choice of keepers. The weather's cleared up now but we've got enough. And anyway, both Rowan and his bike are plastered in mulch and mud and I figure he's probably pretty sick of riding it 'just one more time'...

4:00pm - back home and I take my camera gear inside to dry out whilst the images are downloading. I transfer them to an external drive, backup that drive to a second external drive, and do a quick sift through. We've got plenty of choice and there are several that have worked really well, so I run off some low-res previews and email them to Robin. Processing the remaining raw files will have to wait until tomorrow. I've got to get supper on the go...

When I were a lad...

Sorting through some of the piles (and piles and piles... 30,000+ last time I counted, and that was over five years ago) of slides taking up more than their fair share of space in my office, I discovered these pictures, shot in 1994 between Edale and Hayfield in the Peak District:

All: Nikon F801, 135mm / 24mm f/2.8, exposure unrecorded on Fuji Sensia 100

It was the first time I'd gone out to shoot something specifically for a mag - a route guide for Cycling Plus. I spent the better part of a late autumn day on the most scenic sections of the route with a friend of a friend from Manchester (whose name, I'm ashamed to admit, I've long since forgotten) and a 35 litre rucksack full of spare layers and all the camera kit I owned at the time (one body, three lenses, a single flashgun).

Looking at the pictures nearly 13 years on, I'm struck by what's changed - and what hasn't:

- full lycra and a hardtail... not something you see all that often now. Anyone who's been riding for a while will spot the Bonty hardtail, Mint Sauce helmet stickers and toe clips and straps. The eastomer-sprung RockShox Quadra 21 forks were cutting edge (and rubbish), too. Keith Bontrager, Mint and RockShox are still going strong. My old toe straps now help tie the bike to the roof rack.

- we picked the best bits of trail, I set up a shot and it was re-ridden until I was happy I'd got what I wanted. I still do that.

- I didn't worry too much about the direction of travel. If a shot worked better riding the route the 'wrong' way round, that's the way we shot it. I still do that, too (I'm aware that some purists think this is somehow misleading, but I'm ******ed if I'm going to pass up a great shot because the rider's pointing in the 'wrong' direction).

- I focussed manually, beacuse I had no choice - the F801's AF was laughably slow and completely incapable of tracking anything that moved. Despite owning cameras with cutting-edge AF now, I still focus manually most of the time, too.

- I set the exposure manually, after years of habit. Hey, guess what...?

- I still have the F801 with which I shot these pics, but in the intervening period I've got through a frankly obscene number of camera bodies: a second F801, an F90X, an F80, an F100, two F5s and a D100. I also still have one of my F5s and an F6, plus my D40X, D200 and D2X. All told, that's a body a year. Eek.

Seems old habits die hard, eh?

Bags. Again.

My search for the perfect bag continues...

New kids on the block fstopgear seem to have finally got around to launching their range (I'm guessing here, but I suspect it might've been a bit later in the year than they would've hoped). And very interesting it looks, too. They appear to have taken Dakine's Sequence concept - ergonomic bacpack design, removeable padded camera insert, access through the rear of the bag - and run with it. Two different sizes of insert and a range of different sized backpacks mean there should be something for everyone, and it all looks as though - unlike many camera backpacks, but in common with the Dakine - it should be comfortable and stable to carry on the bike.

All of which speculation is, of course, just that - speculation. Yes, I'll be trying to get my hands on one. And I'll let you know how I get on.

36 inches of breathing room

D'you know how much depth of field you have to work with at different focal lengths and subject distances? Most lenses come with a depth of field chart. It's worth spending a few minutes having a look through it instead of consigning it to the recycling bin straightaway, particularly if you're the proud owner of any longish f/2.8 or faster lenses.

Here's a good example of why it's important. This is a tight crop from an image in which the bike occupies about half the frame:

Nikon D200, 200mm f/2, 1/250 sec f/2.2 @ ISO400, two radio slaves

Shot almost wide open on my 200mm f/2 in fading light, I had no choice but to prefocus and squeeze off a single, (hopefully) well-timed frame as Rob came through at around 20mph (30kmh). In the low light and with Rob appearing from behind a screen of trees half a second or less before reaching the top of this bank, autofocus simply wasn't an option.

You probably can't see it at web resolution, but the handlebars are slightly out of focus. Depth of field extends from a point just behind the bike's head tube to the knobs at the front of the rear tyre, or less than 36 inches (100cm) - certainly not enough to get the whole bike sharp.

At that speed, according to my envelope back scribblings, the bike will blow through the full extent of depth of field in around 1/8 second. Given that the rider's head needs to be somewhere in the middle of that range of critical focus in order to be sharp, the window of opportunity for a keeper is probably around 1/16 sec or less.

With such narrow depth of field and a fast-moving subject, it's all in the timing. I took about 10 shots, of which fewer than half were sharp enough. Curiously, my timing got worse rather than better - the best shots were the early ones. Puts a whole new perspective on the notion of the decisive moment...

Cover: IMBA Trail News Summer '07

The latest edition of IMBA's Trail News magazine landed on my doormat yesterday... with one of my images of the hugely scenic descent towards Port Erin on the Isle of Man on the cover.

Nikon D200, 85mm f/1.4, 1/250 sec f/5 @ ISO100

It's a pretty tight crop using around 1/3 of the original landscape image, but the detail holds up incredibly well.

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware this is the first time IMBA has run a British cover. Although IMBA's focus remains very much true to its north American roots, with 32,000 members in over 30 countries worldwide there's been a conscious effort to extend their trail advocacy influence beyond the organisation's Colorado base.

There's a keen and committed mountain bike club on the Isle of Man that's been pushing to extend the island's (already excellent) trail network. IMBA's assistance - directly or indirectly - with other trail riding centres in the UK and throughout Europe will, I hope, help their cause.

On technology, timing and precision

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about all the clever technology that goes into modern dSLRs. It's probably partly because of all the hoopla surrounding Canon's new 1DmkIII, partly because Nikon is also likely to launch a new range-topper soon, and partly because, well, it's kinda interesting figuring out how much all the work that camera engineers put into all this stuff actually helps out in the real world.

Let's take two examples: focus and frame rate. Regular readers of my blog will know that I'm not the world's biggest fan of autofocus, although it certainly has its uses. The trouble is that I keep running up against the system's built-in limitations far more frequently than I'd like. Smallish, distant subjects that don't fill the AF brackets in the viewfinder are one headache: my D2X likes these less than my D200, although it can certainly cause problems (focussing behind the subject, usually) with both. On the other hand, modern focussing screens tend to exaggerate depth of field, making it hard to achieve accurate manual focus with any degree of certainty. What to do?

Faced with, say, a distant rider coming towards me at a slowish to medium speed, neither autofocus nor manual focus is likely to give me a 100% hit rate. It depends slightly on the circumstances (for example, strong sidelighting helps on both counts by increasing contrast), but experience has taught me a simple lesson: don't rely on either system entirely, and never take just one or two shots. The best method is to focus manually a tiny bit ahead of the rider, then take a short sequence of pictures as they ride through the focus zone. Easy to say, harder to achieve in practice!

Auto or manual? I asked Rob to ride this section of trail twice and tried both - in the end I got more in focus keepers with manual focus
Nikon D200, 200mm f/2, 1/1250sec f/2.8 @ ISO100

As for timing, I have to admit I've begun to miss the 8fps speed of my F5. One of the reasons has to do with focus, in fact, because it can be handy to prefocus and capture two or three shots as the rider passes through the focus point. With a long lens and in the right conditions it can mean the difference between a single keeper and two or even three on a single pass. But holding the button down is no subsitute for watching your subject and anticipating the peak of the action, particularly because a mirror flapping up and down 16 times every second does tend to hinder your view a bit.

I wanted the sun to appear between Rob's wheels as he rode up this ridge (that's the shadow cast by his bike that you can see on the wall to the left). A single well-timed shot worked better than a fast sequence in the end, although I had to ask him to ride it a few times while I tried both
Nikon D200, 10.5mm f/2.8, 1/500sec f/5.6 @ ISO100

The verdict? Clever camera technology can help in certain situations, and I'll take as much as I can get. But it's rare that a specific spec feature makes or breaks a shot, and in many common situations it can actually get in the way of a simpler, photographer-centred approach that bypasses the technology to use practice and experience. Understanding the limitations of your camera's features - by knowing when it's likely to fail and having a back-up plan to get around it - is probably the first step in avoiding the disappointment of out-of-focus or badly exposed pictures.

Which reminds me of another golden rule of photography: edit ruthlessly... and don't let anyone see the rejects except you. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you only ever take perfectly focussed, perfectly exposed pictures... 100% of the time. Right?