Got an email from the camera club that they needed some volunteers for a footrace to benefit a local charity. Having been a Volunteer the weekend before to put up with the constant drizzle during most of the Tennessee game with South Carolina, I figured another weekend of a different kind of volunteering might also be a good idea.
There was a meeting two days before the event where we were given a T-shirt with the club logo on it, which I liked plenty. That’s good pay for walking around aimlessly in a crowd for a few hours, shooting at whatever hit my fancy.
Taking pictures at a race involves telling a story for me. I shoot early, to show a sign explaining the event, and another to show venue, and then it’s off to get atmosphere. Now when you decide to shoot it’s a matter of meaninful content, and how best to show it. You want what you want, and you don’t want other stuff, it’s as simple as that. The idea is to show enough to get a message across. Here’s these people posing, signing, eating drinking- you get the idea. You also want to show the starting point, the finish line and all the hardware and people associated with that. If there’s a stage with a speaker or entertainer, you want to show that for atmosphere. Whether its to be vertical or horizontal comes down to how best to show what you want, and leave out what you don’t need.
When it involves a race, one of the coolest ideas is to be 50-100 yards out in front of the starting line, camera set on continuous shutter to show the runners starting out. I make sure to have the camera pre-focused on something at or near the line. One BIG detail to watch out for, if you want a lot of shots, say 30 seconds to a minute or so, is to watch out for the buffer. The buffer is a big memory bank that the camera has to protect itself. The buffer fills when the camera has as much picture info to deal with at any given time, as it can stand. It’s a bit like eating a mouthful, because sometimes you have to shut up and just chew. When you are shooting the biggest file the camera can stand, it will fill up faster, and shut down shooting long enough to stash the picture info on the memory card.
At the biggest file size, this will happen sooner than if you size down to half that size. I have shot at the largest size, and had the buffer fill up and stop shooting for 10 seconds or more. This is disastrous when you are following the crowd, and don’t want to stop until the picture frame is full of runners! So, set up to shoot at half size, and the buffer probably won’t stop you at all! Digital SLR’s can come up with 9 different file sizes in a jpg file. They also shoot raw, which is non-compressed, but only in one size. Some cameras will shoot a raw file and also save the file as a jpg.
At the largest size, the camera averages a file size at 2.5 megs. At half full, the average is 1 meg. This is with a 6 meg chip in the camera. With the newer 10 meg chip cameras, it takes at least a 3 meg file, plenty big enough to print at poster size and not get much, if any grain in the picture. I guess those cameras might have a buffer capable of handling more pictures than mine will. So, play with it, and see what works best. But it still stands true; the smaller file size won’t fill up the buffer nearly as fast.
Also, remember that the picture file your digital camera makes is a jpg file, which is compressed, to save space on the card. Every time you either open or close one of these files, you lose something. So, the first time you open the file, save it as an uncompressed file type, either bitmap (bmp) or tiff (tif). I have seen 2.5 meg jpg’s open up and save as 17 meg tiffs! So, remember that, especially if the picture is memorable. While there is no hard rule on what determines a file size, it has to make sense that the more info you have in, the bigger a file is going to be. The more colors, lines, shapes, etc. in a picture the bigger it is! Also card capacity is basically set for an average file size. If it says it will hold 288 pictures that’s at average file size. So, shoot small areas, faces, low number of colors, etc, and you will stretch out the capacity of the card. Keep the details down, and a 288 capacity card will hold 360-400 shots easy. Just keep an eye on capacity as you go.
If you want to shoot the crowd coming off the starting line, then a horizontal picture is best, to show the whole crowd. At the end of the race, where you have a runner or two coming in, there are usually ropes marking off lanes, both before and after the finish line.
This is when a vertical shot works best, and the useful picture info is basically up and down as defined by the lane ropes.
