Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Mad dogs and englishmen may well be out and about in the midday sun. But it’s a different class of madman altogether that jumps through the dawn mist and into the Thames at four in the morning!

I was up so early today I could have stayed up late and still needed as much caffiene! The 7th Annual Henley Swim saw swimmers in the water on The Thames at 4:25am. The 2.1km open water race uses the official Henley Royal Regatta course and is 2.1km in length.

Aside from the 2am start you couldn’t have asked for a more perfect morning. A low mist hugging the ground and the sky gradually lightening from dark blue to peach and water temperature rumoured to be in the high teens. I even heard a few of those in wetsuits wishing they’d considered the “no-wetsuit” category instead.

At 4:30am the Open Category was away and heading up stream from Temple Island to the finish at Henley Bridge. Richard Stannard was first to clear the island and break up the mirror still water.

A last minute suggestion from friend saw me through my old MTB in the car so that I could get up and down the river quickly to shoot from different positions. This was a great idea (thanks Alex!) and allowed get the two main starting groups and still get down to the finish to shoot Stannard crossing in very quick 25:47, he was followed closely by Joel Winter at 27:36. Full results for all categories are available at racetimingsystems.com

Nipping around by bike did mean that I had to pack lighter than normal though and I decided to carry everything in my Dryzone Rover and use a Top Loader (75 AW) karabinered as a chest pack for the camera. I did take a flash, but didn’t use it. Instead I ramped up the ISO and used the active focus point to spot meter of faces with the 1D mkIII and 50mm f1.4. Longer shots were with my 70-200 at f2.8 (f4 with a 1.4 extender attached.) I still kept the spotmeter on with the longer lens though and under-exposed slightly to prevent the metering trying to record everything as bright daylight than the actual dawn light.

This was the first time I’ve been to this event and the organisers, in conjunction with the location and the weather have done a great job of pulling it all together. I’ll be back next year I think. The full gallery of my images from this (very early) morning is here.

2010-06-27 Henley Swim 2010 – Images by SLIK Images Sports Photography

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 27th, 2010 at 17:30 and is filed under Everything Else and tagged with 2010, dawn, early, henley, Henley-on-thames, mist, open, river, sport, swim, swimming, thames, water. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.