408 - Los Arenales Primo Tapia
I was particularly excited about today's shoot, because I've never ridden an ATV before. Ever. Today we got to shoot in the sand dunes of Los Arenales Primo Tapia.
Now, I want to make it clear before I write this post up that this was my first time shooting "action sports" photography, but I follow quite a few accounts on Instagram that live in this niche, so I knew what to expect on a minimal level.
DYNAMIC moments were king in this genre. Vehicles turning, flying through the air, and splashing water/sand made the best shots. That was my goal.
The fun thing about Mexico is that there's way less rules. So when you show up to rent ATVs in a a massive sand dune field on the beach, they basically just give you a key and say have fun.
For the first twenty minutes, I rode on Haley's ATV back as we flew off dunes, dropped down hills, and swung around turns at 30mph. She'd grew up riding them, and it was freaking awesome. But I hadn't gotten any shots yet.
What I was liking most about the area was the sand. More specifically, the way it would fly off the wheels of the ATV, frozen in mid air for a few glorious seconds. Maybe my last shoot at La Bufadora was rubbing off on me, but I was in the mood for high shutter shots.
I got off the ATV and had Haley do some donuts to spray sand up. I took probably 20-30 photos, and liked the sand spray in this one best:
“Skrrrrt”
Sony a7rIII + Zeiss 24-70mm f/4
[ISO 640 ~ 61mm ~ f/7.1 ~ 1/8000s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
The biggest thing I learned on this shoot was to not use sunglasses when shooting. It definitely fucked up a LOT of my shots. Images I thought were pro turned out to be completely out of focus when I got on my laptop to check them out. All because the glare in my glasses and the camera screen was too much.
Surprisingly, out of 400+ shoots, this has never been much of an issue until today. I think this was because normally I shot landscape, which lets me sit down and focus more easily. But shooting MOVING objects with bright lights and shades doesn't work out well.
Now that I had a sick close-up shot, I wanted a distance shot. Which I knew would be difficult because it was so blown out everywhere. This is where minimalism comes in handy. SO I underexposed SEVERELY to account for the brightness, and had Haley ride along the sand horizon, with the ocean in the backdrop. I wanted pure ocean, sand, and blown sky:
“ATV Off-Road Fury 11”
Sony a7rIII + Zeiss 24-70mm f/4
[ISO 640 ~ 69mm ~ f/8 ~ 1/5000s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
Again, if I hadn't had my sunglasses on I probably would have done a focus stack on the foreground as well, but I didn't notice how out of focus it was until the edit. Oh well... Sand's not too important, and I think the out of focus actually came in clutch here because you can see the distant ATV better.
One more thing... The edit of these photos took a little while to figure out, but once I got the style I wanted down, it was easy.
When editing photos taken during midday lighting, up the warmth and decrease the saturation a bit. Grain is welcome. This will give you photos more a "film" feel, and play into the atmosphere of heavy light.
I snagged a bunch more shots on this shoot, but none came out because my sunglasses fucked everything up. So those two are my golden pair for this session. You live and learn!
Anyway, super fun time... Cant wait to do more action sports in the future. I'd love to try and get a shot of an ATV in mid-air next time.
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