MTB tips

I am going out riding my bike at the weekend and want to try and takes some shots with my camera. It will be in a forrest mostly and was hoping for some tips on what settings I might use! Should I use the flash?

From the kit list below I think I will take the kit lens, what do you reckon? Not a lot to chose from really lol


Phil

Nobody got anything?

Hi Phil,

I shoot allot of MTB stuff myself (Here in Australia).
If your trying to freeze the action, I would say stay around the 1/500th sec.
You really don't 'need' a flash, but it can help when your in the forest with poor lighting.
I would recommend not using the standard camera flash as it will make all your photos flat.

Keep an eye out for good lighting, sometimes in the forest its very hard, as the lighting is very uneven. try to shoot in either full sunlight or full shade. also be aware of your background... trees etc etc growing out of the riders head.

By the sounds of things you are a rider yourself, and this will help you alot, with understanding where the rider will be going and what looks good.

End of the day, get out there and shoot as much as you can!

Chris.

Sorry - managed to miss this thread first time around!

I haven't done any mountain biking photography for a few years, however got a good few tips 6 years ago from a magazine article written by Steve Behr, who at the time did almost all the photography for MBUK.

Almost always use flash, what you will find is that with the peaked helmets people tend to wear, it casts shadows across the face, so get down low and shoot up, with a blast of fill in flash to lighten the shadows in the face and enable you to capture the facial expressions. My pet hate in my pictures used to be a shot where I couldn't see the eyes!

By getting down low you will also make the rider appear larger than life and give them a real presence in the shots too.

I don't know about settings on your camera etc, however also experiment with 1st and 2nd shutter curtain sync for the flash. Combined with a slow shutter speed and without the lens wide open, you will find that this produces a nice blur effect from the slow shutter speed and then the burst of flash then freezes the motion. The smaller aperture value also will reduce the ambient light captured so it will show the background as darker, increasing the pop of the rider in the picture.

I tended to find that with a rider coming towards you, freezing the action with high shutter speed was the best approach. With the rider going past you then will find that panning with the rider and using a low shutter speed works well....it also means you can be less selective about the background that you choose too.

Main things though, get down low and use flash to fill in the shadows (if you have flash exposure compensation, dial in about -1/3 to -2/3 of a stop.

Given you are shooting friends then experiment and find what works for you best. Take the shot, chimp it and then get them to re-run the same trail again so you can perfect the shot you want.

The lens you have will work well, try the wide angle settings too, when low down and shooting up they give rather a good effect.

Finally, have a look for posts in here by a chap called Transcend (I think that is the name) - he is rather good at the whole MTB photography malarkey!

Good luck and make sure you let us see the results!

Cheers for the very handy tips there! Hopefully I will get at least a couple of good shots! Will definitely let you see the results!

I shoot quite lot of cycling and flash is something what is always with me when shooting cycling. I hate to use flash, but with cycling you just have to use it, no matter what someone else might say. Helmets are really bad thing and flash is only way to avoid shadows casted by helmets.
As far as photos go you have few options. One is straight from from photo, or you go for something a bit different and you shoot with wide angle from down up (maybe something like this). For first option you don't have much other chances then fast shutter speed (1/500 is pretty much slowest). For everything else I try to be a bit more "creative", and I don't really like that frozen look. Slow shutter speed with panning is probably nicest option. Flash set on 2nd curtain surely help with this, but real nice looking pannings are done without flash. But it takes a bit more practice to do it without flash, even though it's not really possible sometimes when it's just too dark in middle of forest.