Motocross Performance Magazine Canadian Motocross news leader
Hello everyone, I’m back for another week of looking back at some of my favourite images from past Supercross races. With the Glendale round coming up this weekend, I looked back through my archives from that race and found an image from my last trip there, in 2020.
This week, the theme is really about light. When I’m shooting photos, I’m always looking for the light. Looking to see what direction it’s coming from. Looking to see where it’s falling and where it’s not. Looking to see how harsh, or soft, it is. Next to composition, light is the biggest thing I’m thinking about when shooting photos. Daytime practice at a supercross can often be a good time to find interesting light. Open stadiums tend to be quite tall, so they often have spots on the track that are bathed in sunlight, while other sections are in the shadows. Retractable roof stadiums like the State Farm Stadium in Glendale are even better, as they’ll often open the roof part way, which can create some really interesting pockets of light. That was the case for this image of Dean Wilson.
When I saw this spectacular beam of light illuminating this particular corner in practice, I quickly set up camp here and shot as much as I could. The fact that it was a sand corner was icing on the cake. I managed to get a bunch of interesting shots from this spot before the light shifted and it was no longer good there, so when Palms later asked me for some photo options for a Dean Wilson cover, I knew this was the shot to use.
When it comes to shooting bright light with a dark background, I expose manually for the brightest part of the image and let the shadows fall to black. The technical specs for this particular shot was 1/1600th at F4 with an iso of 1000, shot with my trusty 300mm lens.
