Seb Rogers: mountain bike photography

The march of progress

My D300 continues to surprise me. Improved high ISO noise (over my D2X and D200) has already enabled me to get shots at ISO800 that I previously would have passed over, but today I had to push my luck further than ever.

In pouring rain and dwindling light, the pressure was on to get a couple more shots to add to a successful day's shooting. My glasses were fogged up, so I used my bag as a makeshift support, relied entirely on the autofocus and squeezed off a few shots. Here's a very tight crop at around 50%:

Nikon D300, 80-200mm f/2.8, 1/125sec f/2.8 @ ISO3200

The exposure should give you an idea of just how little light there was. Although it's hardly the world's greatest mountain bike image, it's sharp and well exposed and, despite the high ISO, there's a surprising amount of detail and very little noise considering the conditions. If you look closely you can see the driving rain...

I won't be making a habit of pushing the ISO this far, but it's good to know that it works as well as this. Yep, I'm impressed. All over again.

A photographer's work...

...is never done. If you drop by here regularly, you may have noticed the frequency of my posts dropping off lately. There's a good reason for that - I'm pretty busy (this, in case you were wondering, is a Good Thing).

One thing no-one tells you when you set out into the uncharted waters off Freelance World is that, when things pick up, the most useful skill is one that has nothing to do with photography. Overpaid consultants used to call it time management, but I'm sure it's got a new (and far more expensive) name now. Either way, the ability to keep several balls in the air is as important as being able to deliver a well composed, well exposed and attention-grabbing image on time.

On the road again
Nikon D100, 17-35mm f/2.8, 1 sec f/10 @ ISO200, single on-camera flash

Here's what my Friday looks like:

- burn a set of over 200 processed jpegs to disc to send to a client for delivery on Monday morning. As I write I need to re-do this, because the first CD turned out to be a coaster...
- capture 10 minutes of video footage from the same shoot to disc in preparation for editing into a 30 second short;
- shoot a disc brake in situ outside, process the RAW file and email it straight to the mag art editor. This is a late arrival for a product group test that I shot a couple of weeks back; the mag goes to print today so it's important that I don't hold things up;
- check and sign a batch of half a dozen prints before taking them down the road to the local framing company;
- check that I've got everything ready for a four-day shoot in the Lake District next week...

...and, with my bike journalist's hat on, write up some bike test copy and source a new batch of test bikes for next month. As well as juggle the usual phone calls and emails requesting information, prices or stock images.

I'll post some more pictures when things have quietened down a little...

Inkjet hoodoo

Like millions of people all over the world, I own an Epson inkjet printer. It's been properly profiled and runs Lyson inks via a bulk CIS system, but in essence it's just like any ol' Epson.

And therein lies the problem.

Because, like millions of Epson owners, although I love the quality of the prints my printer has produced for me (and many satisfied customers) over the years, it suffers the same sporadic hissy fits as many Epsons. Clogged and misfiring nozzles are a fact of Epson inkjet life, it seems. But coaxing and cajoling a sickly Epson back to life involves a bizarre mix of luck, perseverance and endless reserves of patience. And it always - always - packs up just when I need it most (and, conversely, happily churns out dozens of perfect prints when the pressure's off).

After spending four days nurturing it back to health in the last week, here's what I learnt (in between bouts of profane language and periods of utter despair):

1. Sometimes running a nozzle clean is the worst thing you can do
Any Epson owner will be familiar with the nozzle clean function. It's Epson's solution to the problem caused by ink drying and blocking the smaller-than-human-hair nozzles that squirt ink onto the paper: force quantities of ink through the nozzles in the hope of clearing the blockage. The more cleaning cycles you run, the more ink is pulled through. The problem is, often it just seems to make the problem worse. No, I don't know why. But I've learnt this: if you run three cleaning cycles and there are still blocked nozzles (or, worse, there are more blocked nozzles than when you started), the worst thing you can do is keep running cleaning cycles. Turn the printer off, walk away, and leave it for a few hours - or, better, overnight. Which brings me to...

2. Patience is more than a virtue, it's a necessity
The hardest thing to accept about a clogged Epson is that sometimes the best thing to do is just to leave it. For a long time. I've read a number of theories about why a rested Epson often seems to magically perform better, but it seems to come down to a need for the ink in the cartridges and nozzles to settle and for small air bubbles to work their way to the surface. It doesn't always cure a stubborn clog, but an overnight rest is almost always more effective than prolonged head cleaning cycles.

3. Extreme clogs sometimes call for extreme measures
Despairing Epson owners can find all kinds of advice out there on the web, some of it more useful than others. The best source of practical maintenance tips I've found is here. Techniques like using a syringe to flush blocked nozzles clear of dried ink aren't for the faint-hearted, but the advice on this site is based on years of experience and some of the techniques have worked for me. Your mileage may vary, of course...

4. When all else fails, go with your gut...
This morning I had an urgent print job to finish, and two days of intermittent manual head cleaning and letting the printer rest left me with most nozzles firing... but one still blocked. It shouldn't be possible to get good print quality this way, but I ran a test print anyway, took a very close look at it... and found I couldn't detect any evidence of a misfiring nozzle. So either a single nozzle doesn't visibly impact print quality (possible), or it was only misfiring during the nozzle test (less likely, but still conceivable). Either way, I wasn't prepared to risk clogging other nozzles by running more cleaning cycles. I ran off a batch of perfect prints, and stopped worrying about it. For now...

My advice if your Epson misbehaves? Don't overdo the head cleaning. Do switch off and walk away (to let it rest for a few hours) if you appear to be making no progress. And take some comfort from the fact that nearly every Epson owner, everywhere, has likely gone through the same torment as you.

You know you've got a lot of pictures when...

...transferring data from your existing bank of external drives to a new, bigger one takes the better part of 24 hours. And then backing it up to a second large drive takes a whole 'nother day and night.

Faster transfer speeds required, methinks. The next time I have to do this I'll have double the data again...

Aw, shucks

About a year ago I was contacted by the editor of a new book on sports and action photography, asking if I'd like to be involved. It's always flattering to be approached in this way and, when I heard the names of some of the co-contributors, it was hard to say no.

To pick just a few at random: Tom Jenkins' work often graces the Grauniad's sports pages, Bob Martin is a sports photography legend in his own right, Dave Willis is arguably the UK's leading adventure sports photographer, Charles Coates' iconic Formula One images are amongst the best in the business, and Andy Rouse has carved out a name for himself at the highest levels of wildlife photography (and if you think wildlife photography has little to do with action, you need to take a look at his images in this book...).

It would be an understatement to say I'd never have imagined that I'd be sharing page space with photographers like these, but it's right there in front of me... and I've got a whole 16 pages to myself. Chuffed, is all I can say!

The book is stuffed full of great images and, unlike many sports photography books, loads of practical information and advice as well. If you fancy giving yourself a little treat and picking up a few hints on how to improve your action photography, it's well worth a look.

Confessions of an autofocus cynic (part 2)

We've already established, in a rambling and roundabout way, that my experience up until recently of autofocus has been mixed, but largely negative. Regardless of the hype, for the most part I've found autofocus to be too slow, too insensitive, too dumb or a combination of all three to cope with many real world, bike-related scenarios.

OK, I admit it: I'm fussy. But heck, why shouldn't I be? I can focus pretty well with my eyes and my hands. I really want autofocus to be able to do something that I can't, and to do it predictably and reliably.

Having been disappointed so many times in the past, my expectations for my new D300 probably weren't all that high. If you read the specs it all sounds impressive... but I've been there before and had my hopes dashed. I approached the new camera with an open mind, but no real hope that things would be improved.

I'll cut to the chase: the D300 appears to have phenomenal autofocus that actually gets very close to delivering on its promises, and allows me to get pictures that I certainly couldn't achieve with manual focus. Here's 16 frames from a 17 frame, 8 frames-per-second sequence (I left out the last frame purely because 16 looks tidier). Click on the picture to open it at a reasonable size in a new window.

Nikon D300, 50-150mm f/2.8 @ 130mm, 1/1600sec f/4 @ ISO400

I had the camera set to '3D' tracking, which makes use of all 51 autofocus sensors as well as the 1005 pixel colour-sensitive CCD used for metering, allowing it to track a subject based on its position and colour. To paraphrase the marketing blurb.

The remarkable thing is, it actually works. The focus is bang on the handlebar / rider in all but the sixth frame of this sequence, where it briefly focussed on the background (but picked up the rider again for the next shot). I didn't have to do a thing, bar frame the shot and hold the button down. A handful of the shots show some softness due to very slight subject movement - proof that even 1/1600sec isn't enough to freeze fast-moving action sometimes. But in all but that one frame, focus is right on the nail. Here's a mid-sequence sample at around 100%:

(Incidentally, if you think you can see some noise in the darker tones... you'd be right. These images have been processed straight from RAW with absolutely no noise reduction. Sure, there's a tiny amount of noise... but it's invisible at print sizes and cleans up with the tiniest application of noise reduction software. Noise, or lack of it, is a whole 'nother area where the D300 is a huge improvement over its predecessors).

I'm very, very impressed.

Two things are clear from this sequence. First, the D300 is capable of accurately isolating a relatively small, relatively distant subject from the background (to those who might point out that there's reasonable depth of field at 130mm and f/4 I'd say yes, but I've proved the point on other occasions using my 200mm f/2 wide open, with similarly impressive results. So there). And second, the various clever algorithms that the camera uses to keep track of a subject moving across the frame actually appear to work remarkably well. Combined with the wide coverage of the D300's 51 sensors, it makes following a moving target (and putting it exactly where you want in the composition) much, much easier than it used to be.

So my job just got easier in some ways. Which is nice. But what really excites me about this discovery is that it should enable me to get shots that just wouldn't have been possible before. And that alone makes the D300 a very useful tool - and well worth the outlay.

Group hug

Magazine covers are a team effort. From initial concept to a stack of mags on the newsagents' shelves, several people - editor, art editor, publisher and photographer - have an input into the final 'look'. And some months it works better than others.

Props, then, to the What Mountain Bike team for picking up a 'cover of the month' award for the February '08 issue. Nice work!

Confessions of an autofocus cynic (part 1)

Regular readers may have picked up on my casual disdain for most things automatic, and particularly autofocus. Sure, there have been occasions when it's saved my bacon. But for the most part, I've found it rarely lives up to the hype and almost always gets in the way.

I might - just might - have changed my mind, at least a little bit. Of which, more in part 2, to follow at a later date. But first, I thought it might be helpful to go into a bit more detail about why I've been so ready to switch off the result of decades of Japanese optical and electronic experience and resort to my left wrist to get things sharp.

There are, in my experience, two major problems with most autofocus systems. First, they tend not to be sensitive enough to focus on smallish, fairly distant subjects accurately, preferring on the whole to deliver crisp renditions of the background. That's a fairly major practical problem when you're shooting, say, distant riders with a longish lens at a wideish aperture. There's not enough depth of field to cover major focus errors, but it's also pretty hard to see on the screen when the riders are perfectly sharp (or not). The only solution has been to shoot plenty of manually focussed images, and check that at least a few of them are sharp.

(There's a related problem, which is that this lack of sensitivity to foreground subjects often means autofocus will 'see' through the holes in even a closer, larger bike and rider.)

Second, most autofocus systems are pretty dumb when it comes to following a moving subject across the frame. Whilst it's simple enough to get around the idiosyncracies of autofocus for straightforward shots by prefocussing manually, the type of situation where you might hope that all those clever algorithms would actually help - capturing a sequence of a rider negotiating an 'S' bend, for example - also tends to cause problems of the 'anything but the subject in focus' variety.

It's enough to drive a poor photographer to distraction, frankly.

Now, it may well be that my experience has been tainted by nearly 20 years of shooting Nikon. Canonistas, before they were shouting about full frame and low high ISO noise, tended to be a little smug about their brand's focus prowess. I don't know, frankly, but I suspect that the reality doesn't entirely match up to the hype. I know of pro Canon shooters who moan about their cameras' autofocus, just as I know Nikon shooters who are perfectly happy with theirs.

Still, I've often fallen for the autofocus hype of a 'new, improved' model... and almost always been disappointed. Here's a brief, affectionate history of the good, the bad and the ugly Nikon autofocus systems that I've tolerated over the years:

- c. 1989: Nikon F801
My first Nikon camera, and it still has a place in my 'spare' camera bag despite an autofocus system that's all but useless. Boasting a single, central sensor and originally launched with lenses featuring tiny, rattly manual focus rings, it would (eventually) rumble into focus... provided the subject in question sat still for long enough. Literally... because it couldn't cope with moving subjects.

- c. 1996: Nikon F90X
I dropped close to £1000 - a fortune in 1996 terms - on one of these, lured by the promise of its wide-area autofocus and compatibility with the newly-launched (and astronomically expensive) 'silent wave' lenses. Breathless reviewers compared its performance to the benchmark Canon EOS-1, but even after upgrading my trusty 80-200mm f/2.8 to the 'new' model (for a further £1100), I wasn't much closer to a system that worked. It'd follow a moving subject, just. But not in a way that was much use to me.

- c. 1997: Nikon F5
Taking a deep breath and shaking every last penny out of the piggy bank, I stumped up over £2000 for Nikon's EOS-1-beating F5. And discovered, at last, a system that worked. Kinda. It needed the new silent wave lenses to reap the maximum benefit, and its ability to track a subject moving across the frame was patchy, but at last I had something that almost delivered on its promises... just so long as the subject played nice and I put it near the middle of the frame.

- c. 2005: Nikon D2X
Nikon's D2 series promised a lot, with 9 cross-type sensors spread widely across the frame and some fancy new algorithms to keep track of errant subjects. Trouble is, I'd already experienced this system in the film-based F6, and the results weren't entirely encouraging. Although it was undeniably fast - and the central sensor was pretty accurate - it had a nasty tendency to 'see' beyond a subject and focus behind it. Small, distant subjects? Forget it.

- c.2006: Nikon D200
The D200's autofocus was, on paper, less impressive than the range-topping D2X. But, although it only had a single cross-type sensor and the outlying sensors didn't cover such a wide area, I soon found that it didn't have the D2's tendency to focus behind the main subject. At least, not to nearly the same extent. It isn't as sensitive as the D2X, but in the real world it's capable of equal or better accuracy.

Which brings us to the present day, and a re-evaluation of autofocus's usefulness in my day-to-day work. Why? Ah, well, that'll have to wait until part 2...

A cautionary tale

One of the things I've enjoyed recently is shooting the occasional portrait. I'm not naturally the world's most gregarious person and the people I'm shooting are neither professional models nor - except, possibly, within the bike world - celebs, so I have to work hard at establishing a rapport to get the shots I want. Multi-tasking is the order of the day; not only do I have the usual technical considerations to worry about, but my subject is usually looking for some direction from me too. Makes for an interesting change.

Nikon D2X, 50mm f/1.8, 1/160sec f/2.8 @ ISO200, two radio slaves

This shot of trials and freeride legend Hans Rey is currently running over a whole page in What Mountain Bike. Hans is a seasoned pro when it comes to shoots and needed relatively little direction, but he was distracted by the need to pack for a flight to the UK that afternoon and I was all too conscious of the time ticking away. So it didn't help much that both my flashguns appeared determined to play up...

I couldn't work out what the problem was. I'd charged the batteries the previous night - they were fresh and I'd only taken a dozen shots or so before one set died completely. I put a fresh set in, but it wasn't long before they were recycling sluggishly too. I struggled on as best I could, aware that Hans was keen to get on. Despite all the hassle, I like this shot - I think it's my favourite of all my pictures in this issue of the mag.

But the problem persisted. For a week I struggled with batteries dying prematurely. I just couldn't understand it - perhaps they were just exhausted? It wasn't until after I returned to the UK that, in an idle moment while I was unpacking, I happened to read the specs on the back of my battery chargers. And discovered, to my horror, that they weren't dual voltage-compatible.

I'd plugged 240V chargers into a 110V supply and, in effect, fried my batteries. Ooops.

Two hundred quids' worth of new, dual voltage charger and new batteries later, I'm back in business. It was an expensive mistake, but it could've been worse - lack of power could've cost me the shoot.

And the moral of the story? Take nothing for granted. I'd assumed that all my chargers would work in the US, and I was wrong. And always have a backup plan. My untouched Duracell AAs would have bought me enough time to bag the shot and get to the nearest 7-11 for a new supply...

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

German mountain bike site mtb-news has chosen one of my images for its 'Foto des Monats' slot. Wunderbar!