LYON URBAN TRAIL
At first I had told myself,
« This year, I'm going to run the Lyon Urban Trail »
Unfortunately, I hadn't factored in the seasonal allergies - running while sneezing every 50 meters isn't ideal for a sporting feat (that's at least 240 sneezes over 12km).
So I fell back on plan B: going out to photograph the athletes more pollen-resistant than me. Here's the result of about an hour spent walking part of the course in search of images.
The real challenge with this kind of exercise as a photographer,
when you want to avoid the usual clichés of sports photography (the heroic backlight, the close-up on the shoe, the smile at the finish line), is that everything that usually makes a «polished image» simply isn't available to you.
-> The set is dictated by the course, the light is whatever's there, and the models - the runners - are deep in their effort, not
exactly inclined to slow down or do another pass to refine an idea. And fair enough.
So the approach flips: rather than chasing the impossible image out on the ground, I grabbed what I could on the fly, gathering raw material with the post-production stage already in mind.
The race becomes a pretext, a generator of material, and the real lab work starts later, in front of the screen.
What you see here is a lot of experimenting to offer a different visual take on the race,