So as I dug through files to make this page, I realized that the RAW file of this photo is corrupted from when my hard drive shit the bed. Listen to this podcast for more on that.
I usually don’t try to chase a pretty sunset but we just happened to get to this schoolyard at that time of day. I knew that Hobie would have no problem getting onto this rail that I would need a kicker ramp for. This is probably the least mistakable icepick I’ve ever shot and I’m pretty sure he kept his front wheel all the way up there for the entire grind. There’s a bed of jagged rocks under the rail that I made sure to highlight with the Einstein flash I had pointing at his front, about seven feet high, at 1/2 power. I had two 580EXIIs both at 1/4th power zoomed all the way in, miraculously giving me the same reading as the Einstein. They were actually so close that I had to crop them out of frame and I might have even burned out or stamped a light flare. I think I shot this at f/5.6 with both flashes putting out f/8. He’s a bit centered in the frame for my usual liking but I was making sure to put him completely in the darkness of that tree in the background. It would have been a lot easier to achieve with a longer zoom which I didn’t own at the time. This was with the 24-70mm f/2.8L fully zoomed in, 1/250th, ISO100 probably. (Editors note: It was ISO200) The original caption I wrote for this was pretty ridiculous- as I remember- but fortunately Rooftop was the guest editor for the Focus section in that issue and he wrote something more coherent about it. I forget if he mentioned the pretty sunset…
photo by Scott Marceau on October 25th, 2015.
Push It A Stop 