Photographing the Strong Viking Mud Run

Saturday 20 April 2024, 23:23 by Elja Trum | 2,916 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

My niece Robin took part in the Strong Viking Obstacle Mud Run in Wijchen today. It is a route over muddy paths and under, over and through sturdy obstacles. A fun event to photograph.

f/2.8, 1/800s, 250 ISO @ 115mm
I live in Wijchen too, so I could easily cycle there. In my rucksack, I had my Canon EOS R5 fitted with the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L. A great lens for taking nice portraits of the participants from a distance.

You do want to keep your distance, otherwise you will soon be covered in mud too. The entire grounds around the Berendonck recreational lake were incredibly muddy anyway.

If I had been a little smarter, I could have worked that out and put my boots on. By the time I got home, there was more mud visible than shoe.

f/3.2, 1/640s, 250 ISO @ 200mm
Most of the time, I was mainly waiting for my niece and her friend to come past. I did this at a spot where three obstacles stood directly behind one another, a great place to take photos.

The participants first had to crawl under a little bridge there, through the mud of course. Then they had to climb over a sloping wall more than two metres high, before jumping into a mud bath and climbing out again.

f/3.2, 1/640s, 250 ISO @ 78mm
The wall in particular was a serious challenge. Surprisingly, far more people managed it than I had expected. Often with each other's help, but that did not make the challenge much easier.

It was fun to see the differences between the participants. Some took on the obstacle as if there was hardly anything there, while others hauled themselves up with great effort. Quite a few participants took one look at the obstacle and walked around it.

f/2.8, 1/500s, 250 ISO @ 165mm
I thought the detail shot above showed the situation quite well. Most participants could not even reach a little way up the obstacle while standing with their hand outstretched. You really had to jump just to grab the bar.

The Viking Run is not a competition, so everything was very relaxed. It was great to see how participants often turned around after taking on an obstacle to help the person behind them, even when they were complete strangers.

Juli - f/2.8, 1/640s, 250 ISO @ 130mm
To prevent blur, I made sure that the shutter speed stayed above 1/500th. For this, I increased the camera's ISO slightly to 250 ISO.

I kept the lens aperture fairly wide open at f/2.8 or f/3.2. This keeps the background nicely out of focus. Other spectators or participants often appeared in the background, and the shallow depth of field nicely separated my subject from them.

The downside was that the depth of field was sometimes just too shallow. Especially when I photographed both my niece Robin and her friend Juli.

Robin and Juli - f/2.8, 1/2500s, 500 ISO @ 90mm
The 13-kilometre route my niece and her friend completed, with several distances available, took around three hours, but they both made it. You can see them in the photo above after completing the route.

There may soon be a similar event near you too. It could be fun to spend an afternoon photographing it. Check in advance what the access arrangements and rules are, but in most cases I think photographing should not be a problem.

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