Behind the Shot | Spenser Wilton - 2023 AMA EnDUROCROSS RD 4

Image & Story: Noel Flatters | Editor - Enduro.Media / Superfine Media

Spenser Wilton (HTR GasGas / Troy Lee Designs) | 2023 AMA IRC Tires Endurocross Series RD 4 | Idaho Falls, ID
Image © Noel Flatters | Editor - Enduro.Media / Superfine Media | Fujifilm X-H2 + Fujinon XF 33mm F1.4 R LM WR

Shooting Endurocross on a short prime lens

Welcome to the first of our ‘Behind the Shot’ features here at Enduro.Media. In this series we’re going to look back and photographs and videos that we’ve shot and tell a bit of the story behind it from a contextual and technical point of view. For this first time out of the gates we’re going back to Round 4 of the AMA IRC Tires Endurocross series in Idaho Falls, ID, and a shot of Canadian pro Spenser Wilton (HTR GasGas / Troy Lee Designs) taken by Noel Flatters, editor of Enduro.Media and Superfine Media. Here’s his take:

The Context

This shot of Spenser is from the Expert qualifier to make it into the Pro mains for the night. In Endurocross the top 10 in the series qualify directly into the mains. After that the top 6 finishers in the Expert race also qualify through. Here in round 4, Spenser was sitting just outside of the top 10 overall, so he needed to get through this one. I don’t think he was too worried about getting through and into the main. He’s an exceptionally good starter, and normally he can get out front and then just run a smooth consistent to lock in his top 6 spot. I was there covering this race from, primarily, a Canadian perspective and in the Expert race I was keeping a close eye on Spenser and Branden Petrie (Sherco Endurance). I wanted to make sure that I got a shot of each of them from the qualifier for the story I was writing that met my three commandments of Enduro photography: Peak action, frame for context, and tell the story.

The Plan

While you can get luck and grab a great shot off-the-cuff, at events like this I always have a shooting plan. I’ll talk about event/shot planning in more detail in a later story, but for this one I knew I wanted to get peak-action shots of technical features from low angle at slow shutter speeds that had the crowd as the backdrop. Endurocross races are a long day, and there are plenty of opportunities through track walks, practices and qualifying heats to test out track locations and angles that will meet the elements of the shot plan. I picked this particular spot as it was a higher speed feature that was on the second-last corner before the finish line that also captured the crowd in the curve of the arena’s bowl and suites.

For this shot I wanted to go with low shutter speed to capture the feeling of energy, action, and chaos that comes from these races. I firmly believe that being able to convey the feel of an event is crucial to telling the story, and having the technical ability to do this is something that I continuously work at to improve on. The other component of capturing the feeling can be perspective. I love to get really low when I’m shooting at trackside. The ‘hero perspective’ that comes from shooting low angle can be really powerful, and I think that’s shown here. Spenser looks aggressive on the bike and has such a commanding presence from this perspective.

Getting back to low-shutter speed, I was really pleased with the result here. I was able to show the action of the bike, especially the rotation of the wheels and tires. This adds to the sense of speed in the shot, as do the effects of low shutter speed on the riders behind Spenser as they get blurred out slightly by their movement during the shutter actuation and also by the depth-of-field blur from the 1.4 aperture I was using. By the way, those riders are #139 Norbert Zsigovits from Hungary, and #987 Cody Miller. I also love how the areas of sharp focus allow Spenser’s sponsors to be highlighted in the shot.

The Technical Stuff

This shot was taken on a Fujifilm X-H2 with a Fujinon XF 33mm F1.4 R LM WR lens. A couple of things right off the top here. First, Fujifim isn’t the first brand anybody really thinks of when it comes to sports photography, and that’s a little bit fair. For a long time the brand didn’t have the autofocus chops to keep up with the likes of Canon and Sony in the realm of fast action. That’s changed in the last year or two, especially with the introduction of the new X-H2s and X-H2 hybrid mirrorless cameras.These bodies have been a game-changer for Fuji auto-focus, and I don’t feel like I’m losing a lot on this front anymore. The other knock on Fujifilm for sports is the lack of dedicated sports lenses. Personally I think that, for the most part, this is a false flag - especially in Endurocross/Enduro where you can work so close to the action from trackside.

I chose to shoot this with a short and fast prime lens for a few different reasons. First, this was the second night of a double-header set of rounds in Idaho Falls. The first night I’d been surprised by how poor the lighting was in a new and modern arena. I’d had to shoot at very ISO that night, which leads to a lot of digital noise in pictures. Because of that I’d made the call to bust out the Fujinon XF 33mm F1.4. This is a very fast lens, which basically means that it can let in a LOT of light. Far more light than any telephoto/zoom lens will be able to let in. This meant that I would be able to shoot at lower ISO values to keep the images as clear of noise as possible.

As it turned out though, the lighting was much better on night two. It turned out the arena’s tv lights were only running at 70% the night before. Once that had been sorted out on the second day and the lights pushed up to full power I was able to go back to shooting telephoto on one of my 2 cameras, but I still didn’t fully trust the lights so I kept with the prime lens on my other camera.

To get the motion blur I wanted, I dropped my shutter speed to 1/160. This is really slow for shooting as close up as I was to the track, but I was pretty confident that it would work as Spenser wasn’t moving directly laterally to me. He was coming towards me at about a 45 degree angle. This meant that I could keep his head and body in sharp focus by only moving the camera a tiny bit laterally to track his motion. Also, while he and the other riders were moving fast out there on track, they weren’t moving motocross fast. This gave me more leeway with the slow shutter speed. If this was a high-speed motocross corner and I was similarly close to the track, I’d probably be shooting at somewhere between 1/200 to 1/350 to account for speed.

I still shot the lens wide open at 1.4. This, along with the slow shutter speed and the fully functioning arena lights allowed me to keep my ISO down at just 200. For comparison, the previous night I’d been shooting my telephoto lenses at at ISO 8500 to 10000. This was important to me as I could run a quick edit on my shots before I sent them out, and didn’t have to worry about noise reduction processes slowing my workflow down.

In the end, I think that this is a really good shot that shows Spenser doing what he loves, and showcasing his talents and sponsors.