A trip to Megacross - Photo Report

The past weekend I made my way out to Megacross in Mendota IL to shoot some photos.  This was my first time out at the track and it was a really nice setup.  Lots of big jumps, some tighter sections to make things interesting and an overall fast moving track.  The classes were packing into the gates coming out 15-20 wide and made for several rather bad incidences off the line.  The quads were out in full force as well, blitzing around the track making some great action for everyone.   I was only there to shoot photos this weekend so I dont have a race report to type up, but please enjoy some shots from the evening!

Greg Pace 1st place 85 Sr

Riders all stuck together around the tight high to low turn. 

August Miksys

Jordan Mackiewicz 4th place 250B

Maxx Malatia 4th Open A

Scott Zont 2nd 250 A

Hunter Grampp 3rd 85 Jr

Brian Krohn trying to get around Jordan Mackiewicz

Ted Loomis 1st place 4wheel B

Brandon Larson

The quads were flying high!

Eric Utech

Got in to it a little to much and snapped some fender off. 

To Check out all the photo for sale from the event, please Click Here, Thanks so much!

THE DIRT IS FLYING AGAIN: JMX 4.7.12

Trent Poska first place 250C

April 7^th marked the season opener of the Arsenal Series at Joliet MX.  The day had started out sunny with some great weather, only to turn to clouds and rain looming in the distance.  This of course did not slow down any of the action, which we had plenty of this evening. The racing was fierce, even the heat races had some great battles keeping everyone’s attention!

The first race of the evening brought 250 C up to the line with 12 riders ready to get the season started. Matt Gregory charged hard to get out front with the hole shot, Trent Poska on the number 2 Yamaha holding onto second and Cody Johnson in third.   Gregory and Poska continued to battle back and forth through-out the rest of the race. On the last lap Gregory had a bobble which allowed Poska to pass and come across the line for the win.  Gregory held on for second place while Cody Johnson on the Honda came across third.  The 378 of Andrew Friebele made a good showing through the race battling for third position ultimately taking fourth place, with Alec Leasure rounding out fifth.

85 open was next up to keep the pace of the night going, and the action coming strong.  Excited riders pinning it off the gates makes for some crowd pleasing action off the line, and Troy Mead comes out ahead with the hole shot.   Gage Pace was holding on strong in second place with Karson Kokotan, close in third.  The battle for third place was huge with the entire pack bunched together, while Mead and Pace were creating a pretty big gap.  Coming over the large table top Mead had a mechanical issue allowing Pace and Kokotan to pass him. After the dust settled Pace took first place, with Kokotan in second, Mead in third, Bret Dannis in fourth, and Nicky Shelton taking fifth place.  

Greg Pace 1st place 85 open

The 250 A and B race made for some great action getting the crowd into the racing as the lights came on and sun went down.  Jon Williams on his Suzuki is back in 250 A for his first race since his hard crash last year breaking his elbow.  He lined up with the 7 other participants in the 250 B class, being the only 250 A rider of the evening. He was looking really fast out there, and seems to have lost nothing with being injured all winter.  August Miksys came out with the holeshot with Harvey Bushby right next to him and Brian Krohn breathing down their necks in third.  Bushby was having a great race battling with Miksys and was able to pass him in the air to take over first. Coming over the finish Bushby took the win while Miksys held onto a second place with Krohn in third, Kyle Poska came in fourth with David Davis holding on for fifth place.

Open A, B, and C shaped up for great racing with those looming rain clouds finally making their presence known.  Open A and Open B staggered off the line with two riders in Open A and three in Open B.  Open A had Jeremy Smith out in front for the hole shot with Rick Ivey close behind him.  The two of them rode hard keeping right next each other the entire race with Smith holding on to first and Ivey grabbing second.  Right behind them was open B with Mark Seeforth coming out in front, Aj Miksys in second place and Brandon Domark sitting in third.  After battling hard Miksys was able to get around Seeforth grabbing an inside line and coming across the line for the win.  Seeforth held on to second place with Domark taking third.

Jon Williams first place Open A

Open C started out with a massive pile-up right at the first turn. This allowed Curt Horrigan to get out in front with Nick Waszak on his Yamaha in second and Tim Evans in third.  After a few laps Horrigan and Waszak were starting to check out from the rest of the pack when literally out of nowhere Skyler Harkless on his Yamaha 450 came right up on them. Harkless sinks in tight to the inside and flys past Waszak. Then on the last lap Horrigan got pushed to the outside while Harkless passes him taking the lead, Waszak is able to capitalize on the moment and get into second place.  The rain started coming down hard and Harkless creates a large gap to take the win with Waszak in second and Horrigan in Third. I spoke with Nick Waszak after the race to get his thoughts on Skyler Harkless and his very fast ride to the front, and here’s what he has to say.

Me: “So you were battling hard with Horrigan for first place the entire race then out of nowhere the number 265 Yamaha flew around you guys what were you thinking?” 

Waszak: “I remember looking behind me when I was going over the finish line table after the first lap to see if there was anyone close to me and the closest guy was a good quarter of the way behind me. When he passed me I was so confused, then he about took out the guy that I was battling for first with which got me back up to second.”

Nick Waszak second place Open C

125 2-stroke came up to the line with everyone ready to get their first night of racing under their belt.  Brian Krohn on his KTM is able to stick the hole shot with Kyle Moore coming around the outside of everyone to settle into second, and Kyle Poska taking grabbing third.  In the middle of the race Poska was coming in hot and had a bobble dropping him back to the end of the pack, pushing Eric Mack into third place. This left Krohn still in the lead and Moore in second.  On the last lap Mack was able to get around Moore taking the fast outside line through the sweeper to take second place and Poska got around his brother Trent Poska to move into fourth.  The checkered dropped with Krohn taking first, Mack in second, Moore in third, Kyle Poska in fourth and Trent Poska in fifth.

Brian Krohn 1st place 125 2-stroke

SuperMini was up next with Chad Saultz looking to get his outdoor season started after a great Areanacross season. In Arenacross this year he placed first in points for supermini senior, and 85cc 12-15 with a second place points finish in supermini junior. In the main 85 class he took third in points for 85cc 9-15 in the north and central division.  When the gates dropped Saultz came out with the hole shot with Brian Krohn in second and Gage Pace in third.  Saultz and Krohn created a gap from the pack putting down some really fast laps. On the third lap Saultz bobbled a bit, but didn’t go down, Krohn got right up on him, but was unable to pass.  However the last lap of the race Saultz ran into a lapper giving Krohn the opportunity he was fighting for, passing him for the win. Gage was holding onto third the entire race, and Saultz finished in second.

Chad Saultz 2nd place SuperMini

14*24 was a very eventful race, with the 40+ class out there and the Womens class racing as well.  Jon Williams came out fast to take the hole shot for 14*24 with Harvey Bushby in second and Mark Seeforth in third place. Aj Miksys was hard on their trail when Skyler Harkless came into the first turn hot and took himself and Miksys down allowing Pete Hinich to take over in fourth place.  Lary Bank came out in Front on the 40+ start with Arek Kruk in second and Mike Madden in third. Gina Madden being the only registered rider in the womens class comes out with a great showing, has a little trouble in the first turn, but is able to finish the race strong.   In 14*24 Bushby was running a fast race, but came down from a jump and landed right on Banks back fender which sent him hard into the dirt.  He was laying there for a second, but was able to get up and walk it off. He ended up breaking his handlebars and was unable to continue.  This allowed Seeforth to take second place behind Williams in first and Hinich coming in third, with Miksys and Harkless coming in fourth and fifth.  In 40+ the order stayed the same with Banks coming in first, Kruk in second and Madden in third.

Lary Banks 1st place 40+

30+A and 30+B also had a staggered start tonight with Billy Loy taking the holeshot in 30+A with Alex Kruk in second and Larry Bank in third.  In 30+B Greg Pollak came out with the hole shot with Brian Carey in second and Ryan Speirer in third place.  30+A had some fighting for position throughout the race with the results ending the way they started; Loy taking first, Kruk in second and Bank in third.  In 30+B Pollak and Carey carried themselves out front for a pretty substantial lead.  Towards the end of the race Speirer went down putting him to the back of the pack. This allowed Curt Horrigan to grab the third spot, while catching up with Carey giving him a good fight trying to take second.  Ultimately the race ended with Pollak taking the win, Carey in second and Horrigan in third.

Curt Horrigan third place open C

Curt Horrigan third place open C

85 jr blasted off the line with Christopher Gallaher grabbing the hole shot with Joey Gura in second and Nolan Dickinson in a battle for third. After the first turn Nicky Shelton came from fourth place and passed everyone all the way to first place. Coming over the table top things were completely shaken up. Shelton was in the lead starting to pull away with Dickinson trying to catch up, and Ben Ibianskas following their lead to keep third place. After the big sweeper Dickinson went off the track just enough to allow Ibianskas past him to attempt chasing down Shelton who was building a nice lead.  Ibianskas charged hard and got close but was un-able to make the pass leaving Shelton to cross the line in first, with Ibianskas taking second and Dickinson holding onto third place.

85 Sr brings back Chad Saultz to come out in front once again with the hole shot, Troy mead behind him in second and Gage Pace fending off the pack in third.  In the third lap Mead and Gage both get passed by Karson Kokotan who was pushing hard to get up to the front.  When the final lap comes around Gage had been working on Kokotan and finally gets around him to cross the line in second. Saultz was able to hold the lead the entire race, and Kokotan took third.

In 65 open we had Christopher Gallaher taking the hole shot again, he was getting great starts all night.  Right away in the first turn Nolan Dickinson gets around him for first and Timothy Lowe holds on third.  The three of them keep out in front without a change in the order Dickinson comes in first, Gallaher in second, and Lowe in third.

The season opener for Joliet was a great night of racing and everyone had a great time! With 177 riders registering there was plenty of competition out there. The rain was never a huge issue and track was looking amazing all night.  With 3 races this month Joliet MX will be the place to be for sure, Make sure to check out their website www.Jolietmx.com for the race schedule this season, they have a great motocross track in the back that will be getting some use at the end of the season as well so look out for that!

Aj Miksys 2nd place 250B

Results:
125 2-stroke: 1.Brian Krohn 2.Eric Mack 3.Kyle Moore 4.Kyle Poska 5.Trent Poska
14*24: 1.Jon Williams 2.Mark Seeforth 3.Pete Hinich 4.August Miksys 5.Skyler Harkless
25+ A: 1.Charles Buffun 2.Austin Brack 3.Jeremy Smith 4.Rick Ivey
25+ B: 1.Billy McCauley 2.Timoth Armstrong
250A: 1.Jon Williams
250 B: 1.Harvey Bushby 2.August Miksys 3.Brian Krohn 4.Kyle Poska 5.David Davis
250 C: 1.Trent Poska 2.Matt Gregory 3.Cody Johnson 4.Andrew Friebele 5.Alec Leasure
30+ A: 1.Billy Loy 2.Arek Kruk 3.Larry Bank
30+ B: 1.Greg Pollak 2.Brian Carey 3.Curt Horrigan
40+: 1.Larry Bank 2.Arek Kruk 3.Mike Madden 4.Justin Martino
4-wheel A: 1. James Herbet
4-wheel C: 1. Kelton Zeman
50 Jr: 1.Krystian Janik 2.Ian Murphy 3.Will Swango 4.Mac Cullen 5.Johnathan Pacholski
50 Sr: 1.James McDannel 2.Hunter Billingsley 3.Wyatt Mattson 4.Wojtasow Tomas
50cc 4-8: 1.Krystian Janik 2.Mac Cullen 3.Dave Frawley 4.Brooklyn Loy 5.Talan Zollec
65 Beg: 1.Hunter Billingsley 2.Trevor Hughes 3.Kaylor Speirer 4.Justin Friebele
65 Jr: 1.James McDannel 2.Timothy Lowe 3.Noah Miller
65 Open: 1.Nolan Dickinson 2.Christopher Gallaher 3.Timothy Lowe 4.John Greer 5.Noah Miller
65 Sr: 1.Nolan Dickinson 2.Christopher Gallaher 3.Cristian Swieton 4.John Greer
85 Beg: 1.Ryan York 2.Eric York 3.Brian Connelly 4.Timmy Evoy
85 Jr: 1.Nicky Shelton 2.Ben Ibianskas 3.Nolan Dickinson 4.Shane Reilly 5.Christopher Gallaher
85 Open: 1.Gage Pace 2.Karson Kokotan 3.Troy Mead 4.Bret Dannis 5.Nicky Shelton
85 Sr: 1.Chad Saultz 2.Gage Pace 3.Karson Kokotan 4.Troy Mead 5.Leonard Glatczak
Mid-Size (MOD): 1.Justin Martino 2.Derek Devine 3.Ernie Bruhn 4.Brian Avergis 5.Eric Swanson
MiniQuad 0-50: 1. Preston Zollers
MiniQuad90: 1.Nathan Esterland
Open A: 1.Jeremy Smith 2.Rick Ivey
Open B: 1.August Miksys 2.Mark Seeforth 3.Brandon Domark
Open C: 1.Skyler Harkless 2.Nick Waszak 3.Curt Horrigan 4.Cody Johnson 5.Cody Meyer
SuperMini: 1.Brian Krohn 2.Chad Saultz 3.Gage Pace 4.Eric LaPorte 5.Kevin Madden
Women: 1.Gina Madden

Click Here to check out all my photos from the race! 

All you do is press a button!

Now I personally haven't had anyone tell me this(there's a first time for everything right!), but it is a common misconception that all a photographers job involves is pressing a button.

Pressing the shutter button is probably about 5% of what our job consists of.   Take a quote I read recently, I thought was pretty witty "you want to take better pictures? Stand in front of better things".  Take that advice and stand in front of dirt bikes going over jumps, bumps and turns and the pressing of the button gets exponentially harder.

This is a job just like anything else someone may do for a living,its time spent doing something. Pushing buttons on a cash register, answering phone calls, delivering pizza, pressing a button on a camera, they are all things that take your time.

I am not writing this trying to rant, I was mainly wanting to give a little incite into post production and share the amount of time it takes to get a great photo.  So for example if I am covering a race, lets say I am there from 3 till 11pm. So I'm shooting photos for 7 hours, then I need to go home and sort out all the photos and find the good ones.  With 7 hours of photos, this alone can take an hour or more.  Once I have them all sorted then comes the editing.  This is going to vary for everyone of course, but this is my workflow.

(warning, technical talk!)
I shoot photos in RAW format, it is the same thing as having a negative from a film camera.  Its your digital negative and when you process this negative you never lose your original file, same as you never lose your film negatives.  All cameras come preset to shoot in JPEG format, doing this loses over half of your data. JPG compresses all the data to make a smaller file size and in turn throws away about 60% of the information.  Shooting in RAW takes more time (and hard drive space!) in the editing side of things, but the results are what we are all about right?  For the very best results you need to work for them.

That being said, lets say I have 300 photos that are keepers from a race.  Even if I spend one minute on each picture it will still take me 5 hours to edit all those photos.  Now I certainly wish that was a possibility, but its just not.  I've been using photoshop for over 10 years, and lightroom for a long time as well.  I know all the short-cut buttons, I have a wacom tablet to make things go faster. I edit as fast as one most likely could. On a good day I'm spending at least 5 minutes on a photo to perfect it.  So 5 minutes per photo x 300 is 25 hours of editing, one hour sorting photos, 7 hours taking photos. One day at the track can come out to 33 hours of work easily.

Now add that the longer it takes for these photos to get done the less they will be cared about, who's working 33 hours in 2 days?  (this guy)  Now I'm not going to deny that I could do this much faster, which is what I do when I am shooting an event on spec (Speculative work—work done without compensation in the hope of being compensated) You can batch edit photos in lightroom and apply the same edit to all the photos shot in similar situations.  This takes a big chunk out of your time, then I will only fully edit photos that are purchased. If your at the race only covering one sponsor you may need to edit just 50 photos and get them out the same night. The situations are endless, but at the end of the day you will almost certainly spend more time in front of your computer than pressing the button.

I will add to this a little comparison of the amount of editing it takes for high fashion photography.  If you have read my intro you will know my 2nd job is editing for fashion photographers(if not now you do). They are busy, and making enough money that they usually don't ever do their own editing (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).  The editing for these photos takes forever I have an example i'm going to post up and it took me 4 hours on one photo.  This of course is a completely different situation. They are shooting a bunch of photos looking for one perfect shot, not to offer up 300 photos of event participants.
Please keep in mind I did not take this photo, I only edited it.

Not my photography! The Before

After 4 hours this is what the client settled on being what they were looking for:

The After

Just to show a couple more examples here is my cover photo for my most recent blog.  One thing to keep in mind is that shooting in RAW format, the camera adds absolutely nothing to the image.  No color saturation, no contrast, no sharpening, your left with a ugly flat photo that you need to bring to life!

totally flat raw file

5 minutes of tweaking some settings it ended up like this

I will leave this with a perfect example of how shooting in RAW format can save you.  This was my fault (of course), I was inside of the arena shooting photos and I came outside to go to my car. I seen Darryn Durham outside talking to a fan.  I snapped a photo of him and holy crap my settings are for shooting in a dark building and its bright as hell outside! If I would have shot this photo in JPG it would have been completely worthless.  All the blown out areas of white with no detail would get compressed by the JPG format and would be completely gone.  Here comes RAW to rescue, it actually saved all my data and there is detail hiding under those blown out areas. I was able to get a photo that I found to be a really nice candid shot (one of my favorite things to do)

Holy crap is bad, about as blown out as you can get

RAW saved the shot

Now I don't advocate shooting in raw just so you can blow highlights and not pay attention to what your doing. This was a dumb move on my part and shooting in RAW just gives you this much play in your photos.

April Fools Joliet MX practice

Today I made my way out to the local track to shoot some practice.  I was mainly going out to practice some stuff of my own. I have been working on panning a lot the last couple races I've went to, and I was able to really nail some stuff today. I am pretty stoked how they turned out. 

The first race of the season for JolietMX will be next weekend on the 7th.  I will be out there for sure, bringing the full race report.  Some fast riders were out today and I'm looking forward to see everyone out next weekend giving it their all. 

So back to my practice I did today.  Those unfamiliar with panning, it is basically what it sounds like.  Instead of shooting at a fast shutter speed like 1/600+ to stop motion in its tracks, you are shooting at a slow shutter speed and panning the camera to follow the subject.  Hitting the shutter at just the right time, while you are moving the camera with the subject will result in the rider being frozen in place and the background completely smeared. 

Little panning action out at the track today I started out messing around at 1/200 shutter speed and was getting some decent results. I ended my adventure at 1/80 shutter speed, I had to go up to f8 at this point. The above photo was at 1/80.  Once I started being able to nail it pretty regularly I got out of there for the day.  Not a ton of people showed up, it rained last night so I think some thought the track might have been closed.

Keep an eye out next weekend for race coverage, and check out the rest of the shots I got today while I was out!

All my photos from the day can viewed on my website ShiftOnePhoto.com