With the Tour de France visiting England I had to travel north to Yorkshire. For Stage One I cycled 30 miles from my B&B to Buttertubs Pass. Part way up this is the steepest part of the climb at 17% which also has hillsides either side making for good viewpoints.
The estimate was that 10,000 people mostly arriving by bicycle lined the 3 mile climb. The atmosphere was like a big alpine climb and when the race arrived it was confined by the crowds to a narrow corridor.

For this shot I wanted to concentrate on 2 of the riders, Mark Cavendish and Alberto Contador who were riding 2 abrest through the narrow passage left by the excited crowd. I also wanted to highlight the especially excited spectator with such an amazing expression.

The processing used was the zoom effect in Topaz lens effects applied on a duplicate layer. A brush was then used at different opacities to fully or partly remove the effect from the parts od the image I wanted to highlight.

The camera used was a Sony A700 with a Tamron 28-200mm zoom lens lens at 140mm taken handheld. I used ISO 500 and f6.7 to get a high enough shutter speed for the zoom setting and the riders speed so the original image was sharp.

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