Tour de Lafayette 2025 - Labor Day Weekend #1
(Click any image to enlarge)
I hadn’t been to the Gateway Cup as a photographer before and a friend pointed this particular course out as a potential shoot. I found it enjoyably challenging! I also hadn’t ever messed around with panning before: locking the focal point onto a moving target and attempting to sweep the camera in sync with the subject. This will be the first of I think three posts from this welcome long weekend. It wasn’t restful—I put in twenty miles on foot with camera gear in just two days—but it was a joy.
St. Louis is a special prism for experiencing American life. The most salient elements about being American are blasted through in sharper color, and that’s been the case for well over a hundred years. There’s a lot packed into that thought and I started to expound before my editorial ear announced itself and deleted everything. I think I can get away with just noting that late August is a particularly good time to be here. It was easy to love St. Louis this weekend.
50mm | f/2 | 1/6400 | ISO 1250
50mm | f/1.2 | 1/6400 | ISO 1600
85mm | f/16 | 1/1600 | ISO 2500
Weird use of an 85mm, stopping all the way down to f/16, but I had Steven Spielburg in my mind as I went into this shoot as I knew I was seeing Jaws for the 50th anniversary this weekend. Spielburg almost always shoots stopped down so that everything is in focus. In stills, whether you want that really depends on the composition and in this case I shot a set as the peloton approached stopped down and at a loco shutter speed hoping to get isolated subjects despite the flattened focus.
85mm | f/3.5 | 1/1600 | ISO 250
This is the more common approach: shoot with the aperture wide open so that the lens can focus on a single plane and wash out everything else with bokeh.
85mm | f/14 | 1/160 | ISO 200
50mm | f/16 | 1/60 | ISO 4000
50mm | f/14 | 1/125 | ISO 2000
A cyclist took a serious fall, the rest of the racers hold up. The stretcher on the back of the ATV shown is empty, but the fallen rider was on the one in front of it.
50mm | f/16 | 1/200 | ISO 10000
I like this composition, but it could have been great if I’d taken more time—set the f/ value at about half, dropped the ISO way down and slowed the shutter.
