Rotorua Marathon 2018

The lead runners at the Rotorua Marathon start streaking past the Te Arawa performers.

The first Saturday in May is the usual date for the Rotorua Marathon and yesterday saw the running of the Rotorua Marathon 2018, the 54th time the event has taken a lap around Lake Rotorua. Historically it has been a marathon only event but in more recent years a half marathon as well as 10km and 5km fun runs have been added to the day. At age 22, Paul has already completed 3 Rotorua Marathons but has been frustrated in the past 2 years with significant injuries preventing him from competing. Despite this he has gone in to watch the start and support his running acquaintances and this year I went in with him to photograph the start.

The start of the Rotorua Half Marathon in standard frozen motion with a high shutter speed. The 1/200s shutter gave just a hint of movement in the lead runner’s feet.

“Scene modes” on cameras have the “Sport mode” favour a faster shutter speed to freeze motion and get a sharp image of the action and this is a reasonable starting point but I was wanting to try and capture some of the colour and motion of the event. This is a high risk approach as many shots will be uselessly blurred but some will hopefully evoke the feeling of movement with a rhythm and colour. This makes editing easier as many can just be deleted. The odd ones that work can be quite exciting.

Part of the main body of marathon runners crossing the start.

My approach was to set up a composition near the start gantry to make the location clear and include the local Te Arawa performers in the scene as they are such an integral part of the Rotorua Marathon start. I dropped the ISO on my Fuji XT1 to the lowest available (ISO 200), aperture to f22 to give a shutter speed of 1/8 second in manual mode and then shot in burst mode at 6 fps as the runners went past.

There is plenty of room to experiment and achieve different looks from just blurred feet to very blurred impressionism with the planted foot being the only easily identifiable part.

The Rotorua Marathon walkers pass the stage with the Te Arawa performers encouraging them on their way to lap the lake.

Modern cameras are extremely capable computers that will get a decent shot on automatic settings in most situations. Overriding those automatic settings to achieve an image that conveys a feeling rather than simply recording a frozen scene can be rewarding.

For more on photo impressionism see previous posts on Photo-impressionism Workshop, Wintergardens Photo-impressionism, Bird Photo-impressionism and Walking the Dog.

Photos with Fujifilm XT1, 18-55mm f2.8-4 OIS lens and 12-24mm f4 OIS lens. Raw files processed in Adobe Lightroom CC Classic and Photoshop CC with Skylum Luminar 2018 plugin.