I wanted to shoot something other than the finish line, something other than winners (one) and losers (many).
The Vashon High School XC course is laid out on the Vashon School District campus: the start is over at the High School, goes off into some woods on the east side of the campus, comes back onto the Chautauqua Elementary School playground along the edge of the woods, goes across the Chautauqua playfield, onto the jogging track that goes around the McMurray Middle School playfield, back over to the High School, and starts another lap. Two laps total; I think it's something around 2.5 miles.
I knew of a really neat spot on the edge of the Chautauqua playfield where the runners would be skirting the woods and then climbing a very short hill to come up onto the playfield, which continues on gently uphill to the jogging track.
Heavy woods in the background, bushes and roots and stuff to run around, up the incline which is infrequently mowed grass, and onto the playfield which is mowed.
Anyhoo, the idea was to shoot with a very slow shutter speed (1/15th, finally 1/30th second) and pan with the runners as they ran across my field of view and climbed the short hill up onto the playfield.
I was using my EOS 1D Mark IV and the 70-200mm f2.8L zoom, no extender, in AI Servo Autofocus mode and High Speed Continuous Shooting mode, which should approach 10 frames per second if it's not obsessing too much about maintaining focus.
I shot 881 frames total, of which only 196 (!) were even acceptable enough to make the first cut, and ended up using only 77 (!!).
In post-processing I used the Lasso Tool to select those areas of the face and jersey that were in focus and applied a little Unsharp Mask to the selection to sharpen the features I wanted to emphasize.
All-in-all I'm pretty happy with how they came out.
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