Thanks for extremely kind comments during and post challenge. It was an absolute treat to see that score keep going up up up from it's start around 6.3 on the first day of voting.
The start of cross country races is always a magical moment, waiting for the gun to go off. This shot was taken during a recent invitational race as the teams prepare for conference and state championships.
Cross country is a wonderful sport, full of strategy, pride, heart, guts, intensity, and determination. It is also a very short season, with the first matches in early September and finishing up in early November. These kids train all summer (and in the case of the best runners all year) for these 8-9 weeks of competition.
For this race, the winner was Dhahran Velasquez of Capital Prep in Hartford with a time of 16:33 for the 5K hilly and muddy course. He is not pictured in this image, as there were 235 runners in this race. Both of my sons run varsity for St Bernard School and the team in focus in the center are some of the seven runners from StB's.
For the comments about the focus and lens, I love the 80-200 2.8 lens. It is built like a tank and provides great clarity when shooting sports. It is about one-half the price of the Nikkor VR 70-200 lenses.
Processing: RAW image processed using NIK Silver Efex Pro 2. I have a few costume presets that I start with - this one adjusts the levels, the curves, the details, applies a vignette, burns the edges, and applies a soft color tone. With regard to the clarity, I only applied a small amount of sharpening prior to the final resize. The details came mostly from the light conditions (cloudy) and the lens.
Statistics
Place: 2 out of 83 Avg (all users): 6.9670 Avg (commenters): 8.3077 Avg (participants): 6.8571 Avg (non-participants): 7.0357 Views since voting: 4203 Views during voting: 222 Votes: 91 Comments: 41 Favorites: 3 (view)
Oh man! I am so glad this won a ribbon! It was the very first picture that came up when I started looking at the pictures and right off I knew: This is it! Congratulations!
#3, tied with another.
Obviously this is bassbone. Similar style to your FS entry. I'm slightly biased towards good photos with runners in them, being one myself. I wish I could go back to these days of yore where running was my only stress.
Heh, great visual to suit that portion of the lyric line.. Hmmm, the second half of the line mentions a gun and to announce the start of the race begins with the firing of a gun so it is a good fit there too. Love how you captured the runners about to bolt from the starting line - good action. The processing is also excellent. Well done.
'See How They Run' - Lady Madonna (1968)
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