Last weekend I went down to the Saskatoon River Landing with my coffee buddies Rick Elvin, Bas Hobson, Bob Littlejohn and Scott Prokop to photograph watercross races on the South Saskatchewan River. Watercross is an unusual sport – it can best be described as motocross on water jet skis. Riders zoom around an obstacle course at speeds up to 100 kilometres per hour. About 36 top racers from Canada and the USA took part in the 2013 Western Canadian Watercross Nationals. The program also included a wakeboarding demonstration (surf boarding on a wake produced by a speed boat that pulls the boarder).
Bas suggested that we photograph the night race under the floodlights. I have never attended a watercross race before and the invitation sounded too intriguing to miss. The coloured lights did add an extra dimension to the night race photography. After reviewing the images, I think that I will try again next year – there are a few things that I will have to improve on.
It was quite difficult to photograph fast moving jet skis with a 400 mm lens at night. After many futile attempts to get sharp stop-action images, I reduced the ISO setting on my camera to ISO 3,200 and set my shutter speed to between 1/40 and 1/80 of a second. I figured out that I might as well try to get attractive blurry images by panning the camera while pressing the shutter button. Here are a few photographs from the Saskatoon watercross races on July 27, 2013
