Strobists at the Finish Line - Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon

Continuing our effort to deliver the best images to our clients, given the low and anticipated back light at the finish of the Twin Cities 10 Mile, we once again applied Strobist techniques to our sports photography. Jacob Gibb and Kevin Coloton were in charge of our finish line work. Here are Jacob's comments on the day!


Cold, dark and wet...

For those of you not familiar with Greg Brown, those are they title lyrics to a great song. However, in this case it applies slightly differently.

The Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon, held in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN was the first weekend in October. It was cold, dark, and wet. Seems to me it's a perfect candidate for some off-camera lighting. However, let's back up a hair and set the stage.

I received an email from Kevin Coloton a few weeks ago, asking if I'd be interested in working together with him and the Competitive Image crew at the finish line of the US Women’s 10-Mile Championship, which was run in conjunction with the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon. The 10-mile starts at 7:04 am, and finishes approximately 50 minutes later (yes, that's ten miles in about 50 minutes) - with the sun just peeking and the finish area in shade. Read: flat, boring light. Kevin and I set out to change this, by adding strobes to create that pop that we wanted.

Enter 5 strobes, 6 Pocket Wizard Multi-Maxes, and some creative fixturing (we would have used more light, but we had exhausted our PW supply). We visited the scene the day before the marathon to set up our lights and determine our exposures at the estimated time of finishing in order to leave the guesswork out of race day.

Saturday dawned sunny and beautiful. The initial plan was to use the PW Speed-cycler function to create two groups of flashes (with 1/4 CTO gels on each, to try and match the sunrise). This will allow us to shoot multiple frames a second and get flash pops for each. The first try was clamping to the TV bridge which went over the road 15 yards behind the finish line. Unfortunately, this distance required the strobes to be at 1/4 or 1/2 power, and when firing at 5 or 6 frames per second, it would only yield two or three correctly exposed images.


View from the bridge: Final strobe location is circled.




The next likely location was a nearby broadcast tent just off the finish line, yielding 1/8th power pops on heads mounted, aimed, and zoomed to cover the general center finish line area. We had two banks of strobes, one front and one rear. The Speed-cylcer groups were set up to fire a front and rear strobe together (we actually had 3 strobes in the rear group, so one channel had a little extra light). Test fires at 6 frames a second yielded consistent pops. Perfect.


Final Finish Line Setup




Finish line with lighting




With our general malaise set and ready to go, we were ready for race day.

5:30 am: Driving to pick up Kevin. Was that rain on my windshield? Nah, car in front of me must have been using their washer fluid. Wait... it’s 5:30… I'm the only one on the road. Drat.

6:30 am: Dark. Cold. Damp. Cloudy. Rain impending, but just spitting for now.

7:40 am: Finishers coming in 10 minutes. Light is off about two stops from yesterday with no sun and thick cloud cover. Strobes are hot and not giving us an even ambient/strobe balance. Typically, this would be an easy adjustment; shutter speed would be slowed two stops (from 1/250th of a second to 1/60th of a second) to allow for extra ambient. Unfortunately, we need as much shutter speed as we can get to effectively stop the motion of the bullet trains about to cross the finish line. I quickly try to make adjustments to 5 strobes wrapped and gaffer-taped into Ziploc-baggies.

7:42 am: A group of race officials decide to stand in front of the lights (we had them as high as we could get them). Run crowd control.

7:48 am: Crowd control is successful. Kevin is shooting with the wizard, and I'm shooting ambient. Wanted to make a time-exposure and take advantage of the flash pop but forgot. Next year…

7:53 am: Finisher crosses uncontested – Olympian Kara Goucher wins the US Women’s 10-Mile Championship.

Kevin motors through several exposures, and all strobes fire according to plan. Lovely.

8:00 am: Downpour starts.

We hadn't planned on shooting with strobes for the marathon finish as light at that time is usually quite nice. Considering the circumstances, we left our rig up and kept blasting away.



All in all, it turned out quite well. Our background was darker than we would have liked, but considering the situation, we were pleased with the result. Depth was added to the runners, and all strobes and cameras survived the rain. I'd call it a success. Now if I could only get my shoes to dry out...

Our final shot of the Women’s 10 mile National Champion Kara Goucher crossing the finish, published on the front page of the marathon website slide show immediately after the race and on the front page of the Duluth Tribune newspaper the next morning.