2025 New Haven GP
Scroll down if you just want the good stuff.
My road season was short this year given other focuses, but I didn’t want to miss New Haven. It’s the only night race left in New England, and the only big race I’d get to with a crowd thick enough for the wide, atmospheric shots. I wasn’t working for anyone, so it was just me walking under the lights with whatever gear I felt like carrying.
Night races almost always push you into slow shutter. It works, but it gets predictable and I’ve gotten a bit bored with it. I still leaned into it some, but more in an abstract way, chasing light and motion rather than trying to keep riders sharp. To mix things up and keep things a bit more incognito, I carried a Canon R5 with two old EF primes: a 35mm f/1.4 and a 135mm f/2. I often use these as a pair for indoor lowlight situations, and both are film-era lenses. The 135 especially has that filmic rendering like you read about. A 70-200mm f/2.8 would have been the smarter choice, but I don’t own one, and the 135mm is a bit more special.
The 35mm is always classic, good for zone focus at f/8 and still quick wide open. I usually run a Pro Mist on it to match the rendering on the 135, but left it off to avoid too much bloom. Neither lens has IS but I did have IBIS on in the body, only because I forgot to turn it off. I carried a flash too, but with a wireless trigger bouncing it off the pavement for uplight fill rather than blasting riders straight on.
I stayed away from the start-finish where it was crowded and loud. Other photographers had it covered, and I wanted space to move, to find the pools of light around the course. The big takeaway was that pulling back from my slow shutter routine turned into an exercise in finding light. Not creating it, not faking it, just looking harder for what was already there.
On editing, these just have the levels corrected to my preference in Capture One (slightly lifted blacks, crushed shadows, just clipped highlights) and the white balance set by eye if it looked wacky. No noise reduction or sharpening (ever).
In the end I posted the photos for free. I had mixed feelings, since others were selling downloads, but the money wasn’t worth locking them behind a watermark. Most weren’t shots anyone would buy, but they might want to share. Better in circulation than sitting hidden.
Some Highlights
These are what I would say are my ‘normal’ shots these days. Nice blur, between 1/100th and 1/40th depending on rider speed and focal length.
This is slow shutter and at a widish aperture.
Vs Stopped down with a little more light, which keeps the streaks sharper. A little mushy but I think it’s the IBIS.
Looking for pools of light on the course
Shutter slow enough blur spokes and have decent exposure but fast enough to avoid the flicker effect from the lights.
This is what I mean by flicker. The portable lights have a flicker that is evident at slow shutter. Kind of interesting but distracting to me.
Along the lines of my usual sort of thing, but a little more abstract:
Some speedlight work
I do like it, I just feel like anyone can do it, so why should I.
This is my more preferred use of flash - it’s pointed to the sidewalk to give a kiss of fill, but doesn’t scream speedlight.
Street photographer influences:
Two Methods of Separation:
Something I often feel the need to explain, I primarily use motion blur as a means of seperating the foreground, subject, & background since I have mostly slow zooms and the riders are usually right up against a background.
Same lens, but the first is at a fast shutter speed (look at the spokes) but close to wide open.
The second is stopped down, zone focused, and a 1/50 or so. Both prevent this from looking like a photo of the fence.
Post Race Party Snapshot look, as is the fashion:
F/2 doing f/2 things
I am not generally a Bokeh Fetishist, but…
That was New Haven this year. Sometimes the better choice isn’t the most interesting one, and sometimes you take the lens that feels alive just to see where it leads.
There’s 900 or so more photos here.