Learning Center
Extreme Sports

Taking It To The Extreme

by Kayce Baker

Perhaps it’s the speed, the adrenaline rush, the level of skill needed to perform certain activities or all these reasons combined that draws more and more athletes to the world of extreme sports. For Photographer Kayce Baker, her skill lies in capturing men and women in motion during amazing and intense athletic performances. Not only do her photo subjects seem to fly, they almost make it look easy. Almost.

“In order to be recognized and get sponsored in extreme sports, you need to be documented,” says Baker.

Another aspect to shooting extreme sports is the need to show a reference point, which means that the subject of the image, the athlete, is often a small portion of the overall picture.

“Extreme sports have to show a reference point,” adds Kayce, though she admits that when she first started shooting she wanted to get up really close and document the faces of the snowboarder in mid-air. Those shots rarely showed the intensity of the stunt or illustrated the extent of the athletic triumph.

You need to show a take off and landing spot. It’s more about perception,” she says.

When shooting the extreme, Baker relies on camera equipment that is versatile and well-made especially since the conditions that she shoots in can be severe. Her camera gear includes a Fuji S5 camera, a Canon EOS 1D Mark II N which can shoot 8.5 frames-per-second, a Canon EOS 1V Film Camera, Tamron’s new tele-zoom, the SP AF 70-200mm F/2.8 Di LD (IF) Macro and the Tamron SP AF 14mm F/2.8 Aspherical (IF), which includes two Hybrid Aspherical lens elements. The Hybrid Aspheric elements compensate for aber-rations and result in flat-field photo illustrations. She also rounds out her shooting gear with a Hassy 501CM, Hassleblad Xpan, and several Holgas.

THE CHALLENGE

Baker has several challenges when shooting snowboarders - the speed of the shot and shooting against snow, a natural light reflector. Capturing fast moving objects and suspending them in mid-air requires skill and technique. She also rarely gets to choose the time of day to shoot or the angle of her subject. She sometimes is required to shoot directly into the sun.

The Risto shot was taken at the Annual U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships on Stratton Mountain in Vermont. Baker used Tamron’s 14mm lens. In order to get the exposure correct, she metered the location of the shot and then metered off a neutral object, this time it was herself. The result is white snow, a blue sky and a colorful Risto Matilla, one of the world’s top snowboard-ers. For the shot, she used a fill flash, an aperture of F/16 @ 1/250 sec.

The Yale Cousino Rail shot was also taken at the U.S. Open. To build the “slope-style” image, Baker had to stand out of the way of Cousino. She used Tamron’s 70-200mm tele-zoom lens and started with a reference point then moved with the boarder, shooting nearly 10 shots a second with an aperture of F/11. Moving and contorting her body with the boarder’s movement began with a focal length of 90mm and quickly zoomed out to 70mm. The secret to building the shot is to move. Many photographers stand in one place shooting a shot like this one, ending up with the same perspective throughout the photo. Baker then pieced it together in PhotoShop CS3.

This past February launched the second annual Union Square Street Session Rail Jam in New York City, bringing in 14 trucks of snow, a down bar with stairs and other equipment for snowboarders to test their abilities. Baker shot Jed Anderson sliding easily down a flight of stairs using just natural light, a focal length of 91mm with her Tamron tele-zoom with an aperture of F/5.6 @ 1/350 sec.

Her shot of Jeremy Cloutier suspended over the rail hovering above a Jeep® is a great example of extreme perspective and the danger many stunts entail. This was shot using fill flash at a focal length of 500 with an aperture of F/3.5 @ 1/180sec.

The Chris Rotax image was shot at 8pm and also used only natural light with a focal length of 70mm, an aperture of F/3.5 @ 1/180 sec. Rotax took third in the overall competition.

The ESPN Winter X Games are already past us, but fortunately it is an annual event which continues to draw extreme competitors. The Vancouver 2010 Olympics will no doubt showcase the level of daring and skill embodied by these athletes with spectators continuing to call for more. When shooting, remember that perspective is everything. Baker uses natural light, fill flash to maintain the integrity of the background and strobes when pho-tographing at night.

“Riders are there for competition and as such they are also there to be photographed,” reminds Baker.