Photographing Cross Country

As much as I enjoy shooting football my favorite sport is probably track and cross country because that is the sport I did. I suppose that there is not as much action but I ran cross country all through high school and college and can feel the struggle all of the kids are going through on the course. I had a minor lull in blogging due to some technical issues with my PC (let's just say, I will not be using liquid cooling in my PC anymore) but I am back on track now.

Both the boys and girls cross country teams traveled to Shrewsbury High School on September 12th for a dual meet and I brought my 5D Mark IV, 1D X Mark II, Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens and Canon 300mm f/2.8 IS II USM lens for the shoot. This was a very difficult race to shoot because I had no idea where the race started or finished, there did not seem to be any good places to shoot from and the sun was very bright casting harsh shadows on all of the athletes. I found the start but did not get too many good shots from there and then I had to hustle, carrying all of my gear, to the finishing area, which was about half a mile away, in time to catch the runners. On top of the confusion about the course it was almost 85 degrees and I do not enjoy hot, humid weather.

It was really cumbersome running around with the 300mm f/2.8 lens and I was a bit discouraged on the way home and did not think that I would have many good shots. However, I think that the photos came out all right in the end.

Slide show - I still can not get the embeded SmugMug slideshows to work.

The next race was home at Algonquin High School against Leominster High School. The conditions were very different as we are getting the leading edge of Hurricane Jose. Based on how awkward it was carrying around the 300mm lens I decided to go with the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens with the 1.4x teleconverter figuring that I would have to stop down to at least f/4.0 to get a large enough depth of field when the runners were grouped together. In the end I kind of wish that I had the 300mm lens because it provides incredible sharpness, isolation and compression. Plus, you really look like a pro carting that thing around.

The pictures for this meet came out really well except for the white balance. I have gotten into the habit of shooting RAW for night games for the extra flexibility but shooting JPG for day games to speed up the post processing. For some reason I had to make minor adjustments to all of the photos in these galleries to get decent skin tones and there were a few photos that I just could not save. I may revert back to using the 300mm lens, even for the cross country, and shooting in RAW so that I can apply a blanket WB setting across all images in a gallery.

Slide show of boy's Leominster race
Slide show of girl's Leominster race

Gallery links:
Shrewsbury race
Girl's Leominster race
Boy's Leominster race

Algonquin vs Westborough XC - 2016.11.01

Photos to Download

It took me quite a while to post these photos because I have been so busy at my job that pays the bills. I arrived at the meet midway through the girls race so I did not get as many photos of that race. It was a little difficult getting decent pictures today because of the harsh sunlight (the sun is so low in the sky it created very harsh shadows at the finish line) so I had to get creative in using the trees as blinds and running between multiple locations to get the best angle. Most of these photos were shot with the 7D Mark II fitted with the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM in manual mode with the aperture set to f/2.8 - f/3.2, auto ISO and the shutter speed between 1/1000 sec and 1/2500 sec. I did not have to do much post processing other than trying to deal with the shadows - I tried to pull the shadows up and pull the highlights back.

Midland-Wachusett League XC Championships - 2016.10.26

Photos to Download - Girls JV
Photos to Download - Boys Varsity
Photos to Download - Boys JV

Meet Results

I was able to make it to the League Championships to get the start of the Varsity boys race but I feel bad that I missed the Varsity girls. It is tough making it to meets in the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday for a working schmuck like myself. Most of these photos were shot with the 7D Mark II fitted with the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM in manual mode with the aperture set to f/2.8 - f/3.2, auto ISO and the shutter speed between 1/1000 sec and 1/2500 sec. My backup for close up shots and some of the shots in the woods was the 5D Mark III with the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II lens also in manual mode. The exposure settings were similar to the 7D but I had to push the ISO up to 4000-5000 in the woods because it was pretty dark and overcast later in the meet. I hope the late fall foliage provides a nice backdrop and taking these pictures in the late fall with temperatures dropping into the 40's brings back a lot of memories of running cross country back in the day. Cross country is probably my favorite sport so it is fun to photograph.

Algonquin Boys JV Cross Country at Wachusett Invitational - 2016.10.08

Photos to Download

Most of these photos were shot with the 7D Mark II fitted with the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM in manual mode with the aperture set to f/2.8, ISO set to 100 and the shutter speed between 1/1000 sec and 1/2500 sec. My backup for close up shots was the 5D Mark III with the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II lens also in manual mode with very similar exposure settings. Wachusett Regional High School is set high on a hill and provided for some really cool back drops. From the photos you can tell that all of the hills were also fairly brutal on the runners and provided some dramatic facial expressions.

Algonquin Boys Cross Country vs Wachusett - 20161004

Photos to Download

Most of these photos were shot with the 7D Mark II fitted with the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM in manual mode with the lens wide open (f/2.8) and the shutter speed set to 1/1000 sec. I set the ISO to 100 because it was very sunny out. My backup for close up shots was the 5D Mark III with the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II lens. I struggled a little bit with how harsh the sun was and the contrast differences between the sunny and shady areas.

This was my first time using Adobe Lightroom CC 6.1 for post-production. Previously I just put all of the raw, unedited photos up and was never really satisfied with how the collection looked. The workflow I used was:

• Go through all photos and flag keepers/rejects
• Adjust exposure on 1-2 of the keepers to determine basic settings.
• Sync exposure settings to all keepers
• Step through all keepers and fine tune exposure and set crop
• Export to online collection

I have to come up with an efficient workflow so that I don't spend hours in post but this was the first time and it is a learning experience.