Written by: Chris Wallis
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

a bad day for the tour

I decided to maximise my chance of getting to the final climb of the day where all the action would be and miss the start, I have more than enough shots of everyone at signing on.

I made a nice leisurely journey to Gourette and the shuttle point for the press half way up the final climb, being a very small area at the top the press had to park just below gourette the ski resort and get a shuttle up. This provided a nice challenge in pack for the journey up, making sure I wasn’t going to get caught short, and as with my previous experience I took flash, long, short and wide lens not quite knowing what was up there.

The finish was not a good one for photography, the finish line was on a peak in the road and the press placed behind the line and the crest, shooting almost blind, into the sky and with the sun coming from in front casting some lovely shadows over people crossing the line. With a few minutes to go I, and a few others was given the chance to stand on the podium giving some good height and moving the sun slightly out of shot and reducing the shadows. This working really well, as you can hopefully see in the finish shots, getting a sneaky peak at someone else’s shot who stayed low and behind the line the shadows on their shots was much greater.

Sadly the shots of the winner were the last ones of him in the yellow jersey and in the race, the 3rd drug scandal of this years tour saw the yellow jersey wearing Rasmussen sacked by his team and excluded from the race for missing out of season drugs tests.

Trackback Print

Location: Blogs Wallis Photos Blog Tour De France 2007