Biking the Roads of Free Union, Virginia – Charlottesville Sports & Travel Photography

Last month I as asked by C-Ville Weekly to shoot a couple items for their 2011 Best of C-Ville Issue. One of the assignments was to showcase Free Union, Virginia, which was voted best place to road bike. Free Union is an absolutely beautiful location located just outside Charlottesville in Albemarle County. It has for years been a favorite place for people to bike, run and jog and by the photos I’m sure you can see why. The area is loaded with breath taking views and vistas of the rural landscape overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. Besides the views, the terrain consists of gently rolling hills which makes for great exercise and a fun ride.

Even though road bikers are not hard to find on these roads, especially on a cool summer morning, I decided to recruit a friend that regularly bikes these roads and make a full shoot out of it. We met up bright and early in the morning around 7am because I wanted to make sure we were able to capture the soft morning sunlight. No, that is not Lance Armstrong in these photos; it’s my friend and fellow photographer, Martyn Kyle. He was a great sport and we had a blast riding around that morning taking photos. Here are some of the photos I captured that morning.

These last two photos demonstrate how you can use slow shutter speed to create two very different photos of the same subject. They were both shot at 1/40 sec at F16. The first photos I held the camera still which blurs the biker since he was moving fast along the road. The second I used a panning technique where I focus on the biker and follow the him with the lens. Doing this you can show action by freezing the subject and getting motion blur in the background. Same location, same camera settings, two very different photos.

We ended the morning shooting some interesting things around Free Union including the old Maupin House, which was constructed around 1850. You can see some of Marty’s photos he took around free union on his blog by clicking Morning in Free Union, VA….

Also be sure to pick up the Best of C-Ville 2011 issue and see the first image in this post featured on pg 89.