Burning Seed Skate Comp

One of my highlights at Burning Seed this year was that a theme camp had trucked a mini-ramp all the way from Melbourne just so they could hold a skateboard competition in the middle of the festival. When I saw it listed in the What/Where/When guide, I knew I had to pack my fisheye lens and spend some time near the coping.

HALFPIPE SKATEBOARD COMPETITION [12:00 – 2:00]
Heaven IS a Halfpipe. So come show your skills on our mini ramp or come and watch as skaters go big or go home for stupid prizes. No doubt there will be some radically bodacious tricks and totally spectacular bails! Beats from secret neighbours TBA!

One of the things that stood out for me was how positive and supportive the skaters were for each other. Even though it was technically a competition, it was not about dominating and being the best. It was about the skaters pushing themselves. Someone struggling with a difficult trick on multiple runs and finally landing it got way more acknowledgement than someone effortlessly pulling off difficult tricks that weren’t a challenge for them. Watching everyone support and give space to the children (of vastly different skill levels) who were having a go was heartwarming.

What did I learn as a photographer?

One of my resolutions this year was to shoot some skateboarding photos. I shot a vert ramp competition in Prahran earlier this year (and was lucky enough to meet and chat to @GoobSkate, who has taken some amazing skate pics over the years), but I wasn’t very happy with my photos. The skate comp at Burning Seed was my chance to have another go.

• I was shooting with my Canon EF 16–35mm f/2.8L II USM and a cheap unbranded 8mm f/3.5 manual focus fisheye. It was impossible to get an autofocus lock in time to capture a trick (and there is no autofocus on the cheap fisheye lens anyway), but the work-around was to maximise my depth of by using a tiny aperture (I stopped the fisheye down to f/22). The daylight was so bright that even at ISO100, any big apertures wanted to push my shutter speed above the 1/8000 second maximum anyway.
• To some degree getting a good photograph is a numbers game. Shooting on a mini ramp instead of a huge vert ramp meant that the number of tricks per minute was much higher, and the skaters were more likely to attempt impressive lip tricks, giving me more opportunities to take the perfect photo. I was much happier with my photos from this shoot than from my session at the Prahran mega-ramp.
• Even though my Canon 16-35mm lens is pretty wide, the fisheye lens made such an amazing difference to my shots. Everything looked bigger and more dramatic (even a tiny mini-ramp looks big with a wide lens and a low angle). All my favourite photos were taken with the fisheye.
• Normally my face is practically glued to my viewfinder, but most of my photos from this session were taken blindly, with my camera hand outstretched and held low and my big depth of field keeping everything in focus. Because the fisheye has close to a 180 degree field of view (when the lens hood is removed), my face ended up in the edge of a lot of the photos (more cropping!). Shooting with an unprotected front element that bulges out from the lens when I was so close to flying skateboards made me glad that I was using a $250 no-name lens instead of a $1500 Canon fisheye (you can bet that I kept the lens hood on my Canon 16-35mm).
• Editing photos involved a lot of straightening (I like flat horizons but the style of photography probably also permits wildly angled shots too) and cropping. The 8mm fisheye on a full-frame body does not cover the entire sensor, so unedited photos show a black circle at the top and bottom of the frame. I did a lot of square cropping.
• Faces are important. Photos of bodies without faces leave me cold. Who are they? What emotion are they feeling? Where is their eye-line? When you are at the top of the ramp waiting to take a photo you have about a second to move to the right position on the platform. I started to get better at being in the right place when I realised that you can see the line the skater is taking along the flat, combine that information with their stance (are they goofy foot or regular), and make a prediction about whether they would be attempting a frontside or a backside trick and, therefore, where the camera should be to have the best chance of including their face.
• Backgrounds are important (and even more important when they are in-focus due to a large depth-of-field). One of my annoyances when shooting performances is having audience members looking bored or on their phones. It ruins the story that is told by the photo. The audience at the skate comp were pretty focussed, but sometimes the skaters waiting their turn were clearly more interested in having a chat then in watching the action. Not sure what to do about this, apart from throw away photos where the foreground has an amazing trick, and the background spoils it.
• My cheap fisheye lens doesn’t communicate with my camera, so the metadata in Lightroom does not include aperture and the focal length is shown as 50mm instead of 8mm. I made a commitment to include full metadata on on the photos I post, so I needed to update the metadata manually. I filtered all my fisheye photos (Grid View, Library > Enable Filters > Metadata. Lens = Unknown), but the focal length is not user-editable in the Metadata panel. I had to download and install ExifTool and update my RAW files with some arcane command line magic:
  $ cd /Volumes/Lightroom/TEMP
$ TODO: fix this
• The auto white balance on my Canon 5D Mark II and my 5D Mark IV selected very different values for the same scene (5600K vs 4800K). The shots from the Mark II looked too warm. Fortunately this could be bulk updated in Lightroom directly (In the Library module, select all in Grid View. Switch to the Develop module, adjust the temp and press the Sync button. In the dialog window, make sure that only the White Balance checkbox is selected.).

I still want to experiment with skateboarding and motion blur (tracking the subject and blurring the background to emphasise speed), but it is probably easier on the flat and wouldn’t be practical with a wide lens. Definitely a shot for some other time.