I apologize for taking so long to post since the teaser I put up in Snappy Friday.  My son and I had spent the weekend in the state of Pennsylvania to meet up with our friend, JP.  Yes, a road trip!  I do love road trips!  The reason for this road trip?  It was to try my hand at taking some sports photography, namely, the Thompson Bucks County Classic!

Now in its 13th year, this event has turned into a full day event that features a multitude of bike races, ranging from those for children, amateur men (28 miles), as well as professional women (23.8 miles) and men (62 miles).  For the first time this year, high wheel bikes (Penny Farther)  that were popular in the late 1800’s had their own feature race.

 

So to take photos at this event, I needed to prepare, and so did JP.  My son joined us for the adventure, but I wasn’t expecting him to take the photos that JP and I were going after.  I let him have fun discovering anything going on around the town.  JP and I started looking over our equipment first.  I wanted to shoot some film, so you saw the multiple rolls that I had picked up for the day in the Snappy Friday.  To take the film shots, I brought my Nikon F90x.  JP also equipped me with a Nikon F100 just in case.  For digital, it was almost safe to say we were prepared.  I had my trusty D300, and JP was sporting his  D700 as well as his battery of lenses.  To add to this nonsense of lenses and camera bodies,  JP also procured a Nikon D5 as well as a Nikkor 200-400 mm F4 lens!

 

And I thought this much kit may have been a bit of overkill.  I was never SO WRONG!  The lenses made me really appreciate why a pro uses “PRO STUFF”.  These lenses helped me get the most out of my shots during the insanely fast action occurring during a sporting event of this caliber.  I may have missed a lot of the shots I wanted to get, but because of the responsiveness from the lenses, I was able to quickly recompose and grab a different shot.

 

 

Anyways, on to the race.  As I do have film shots, I still have to drop the rolls off to the friendly folks at Downtown Camera to process.  So stay tuned for those when I have the film scanned.   I am also processing a lot more shots – this is the first set of many and I plan to put up more in separate posts later this week.

The first race of the day was the amateur men’s.  There were 72 racers, according to the announcer, and although they are amateurs, they were tearing around the corners!

 

 

 

This was followed by the children’s races and the high wheel bicycle race.

 

 

 

 

 

Now that I’ve finished warming up by taking pictures of the highwheels, let’s step up the speed and action. First with the ladies.

 

 

And some from the pro men’s race!

 

As I said before, I’m still processing more shots.  Stay tuned for more!