Here's a pretty straightforward one: Bloody Nipples!

My friend Ian was sitting at the finish line of the Portland Marathon Sunday morning, dutifully watching the LCD screen of the camera making sure every finisher was documented for the world to see, when he spotted this guy. Ian's eyes instantly locked on the guy's chafetastic nips, probably forcing his camera to stray from the finish line as he whispered to us in amazement “That guy’s nipples are so bloody!” So if anyone that finished the Portland Marathon on Sunday didn’t get their finish uploaded to the Internets, you can blame this guy and his nips.

But what a trooper, right? Staring at the nipple-level bloodstains we couldn’t help but cringe as we tried to imagine how many miles he had run with that kind of chafing. 10 miles? 15 miles? That’s endurance right there. I give that guy the gutsy award for the day. No, the week. My only question is, what is left where his nipples were? Just some smooth circle patches?

In case you haven't heard, Haile Gebrselassie rocked the running world this week by breaking 2:04 in the marathon. I say that he specifically rocked the running world rather than the entire world because when I found out that he had broken the record, I went the New York Times sports page to see what the would have to say about such a historic event. Not much apparently, as Gebrselassie's epic feat was featured at the bottom of the page with a stamp-sized thumbnail image, while the rest of the page was dominated by group of pudgy semi-athletes playing baseball for the last time at their stadium.

In any case, here’s shot of Gebrselassie just before his historic run. Now, this isn’t the most exciting picture from the race, but I’m using it because it does a good job of illustrating the photo concept I want to go over today: depth of field. Depth of field (DOF) referrers to how much of the scene is in focus in a picture. If the DOF is large, then almost everything in the picture will appear in focus, while if the DOF is small, then only a small amount of the scene will be sharp.

This picture of Gebrselassie, like most sports photos, uses a small DOF. The DOF is mainly dependant on the magnification of the subject (how big of a zoom lens you’re using) and the lens’ aperture (f-stop). The aperture of the lens refers to how big the hole letting light into the camera is. A large aperture (small f-stop number) lets in a lot of light and creates a small DOF, while a small aperture (large f-stop number) lets in a small amount of light and creates a large DOF.

So in the photo at the top of the page, Gebrselassie is in focus but the tower is very blurry because the photographer is using a large zoom lens (magnification of the subject) and a large aperture (a small f-stop number, like f2.8). Sports photography usually uses a small DOF because it makes the subject pop out from the blurry background, focusing the viewer’s attention on the action.

So there you have it, Haile is awesome, baseball sucks, and sports photography uses a small DOF!

I went to Seaside’s Three Course Challenge cross country meet this weekend expecting some good clean fun. I was sorely mistaken. Things got real dirty real quick, and the result wasn’t pretty. I think the source of the problem was the huge 25-meter-long mud pit planted at the base of a long hill in the middle of the course. While most of the race leaders dodged the shoe-sucking mud by running around the outskirts, the middle of the pack was herded straight through the center, resulting in face plants, voluntary cannonballs, mid-race mud warfare, and dozens of lost shoes.  

At the end of the last race, me and the other mud pit spectators took a moment to survey the damage, flicking off the globs of mud stuck to our pants and camera lenses. I thought things were wrapping up so I started gathering my things to head back up the hill. But the carnage had only just begun. A girl already half covered in mud and surrounded by three other teammates stepped up to the mud pit and gathered up a hefty mud ball in her hands. Then she looked across the mud pit into the eyes of the other half of her team, who had also acquired mud balls, and said “Ready?”

The menacing tone that she used for the word “ready” made the rest of us semi-clean folk fairly nervous. Ready for what exactly? Whatever it was they were ready for, I was fairly certain that I was not. Noticing that faces of the two-dozen other kids standing around the pit had taken on a steely pre-combat look, I decided it would be a good time to head for higher ground. I got about half a step back from the pit when the muddy girl suddenly yelled “NOW!” and before her mud ball had reached the face of her teammate, the air was filled with a crossfire of mud balls and screaming.

By the end of it all I was fortunate to walk away with only minor splattering, but others weren’t so lucky. It’s been almost a week now since the fight, and my clothes are now clean and mostly spotless. I’ve picked most of the mud out of my hair and gathered up my life where I left off. But the shell shock still lingers. Every now and then I’ll be walking through a crowd and hear someone behind me say “Ready?” in that low, menacing tone; and a chill will run down my back as the taste of mud fills my mouth.

All right all you photo enthusiasts, this week we’re gonna get a little technical for our photo of the week. Here’s the challenge: How do you make Alberto Salazar appear as though he has just descended from the heavens on an intergalactic quest to make American distance runners slightly more competitive—without making him look like the disgruntled DMV employee that his facial expression would suggest? The answer is: put a halo of light behind him, then using fill-flash (that’s the word of the day) light up his face at the same time!

Not only does this look cool, but you can do it yourself. It’s easier to do with a little more sophisticated gear than your average point and shoot, but some cameras may have presets for the effect. I’ll explain how to do it if you have a camera with manual settings and an external flash. You’ll also need a bright light source (like a sunset), which will create the halo.

Here’s how it goes: Have your subject stand in front of the sun/bright light so that it looks like the light source is emanating from behind the subject’s head. Set your camera (on it’s manual setting) to expose for the background (the sunset behind the person). This is where the external flash comes in. Without a flash, the person’s face would be completely dark because the camera is set to expose for the very bright background. To balance the background and foreground, point your external flash directly at the subject’s face. Using ½ power as a starting point, experiment with changing the flash’s power until the both the background and the subject’s face are each exposed correctly.

And that’s how you make Alberto look epic. Nice find Greenville Runners Club!

Hey there Runnerspacers, sorry to take off for a week and leave you hanging without your photo fix, but in my defense, I was camping in the woods and had a lot of fun. When you're camping, there are certain things you simply aren't allowed to do, such as: 1) Do anything productive, 2) shower or 3) wear clean clothes. Not doing any of these things for a week freed up a lot of my time, and I used that extra time to sit in front of a campfire and stare at it blankly, which for some reason never gets old. While I sat there for hours on end, I tried to figure out why I wasn't getting bored, and while I never quite figured it out, I did come to the conclusion that besides a TV, a campfire is the only man-made thing that you can stare blankly at for three hours or more and still remain entertained. If you can think of any other object I've overlooked with similar abilities, let me know (and boobs don't count because they aren't man-made—usually).

But I'm getting sidetracked from the task at hand. This week’s photo, submitted by txRUNNERgirl, was taken four hundred years ago and depicts a man wearing large leather pants being chased down by three members of the Silly Hats And Absurd Mustaches Club. America’s oldest sports club, SHAAM was formed around the concept of fox hunting, but instead of foxes they used skinny runners, and instead of hound dogs they used large absurd-moustached men wearing silly hats and carrying cone-shaped bats. I'm pretty sure that's what's going on in the picture. But don't take my word for it, I'm no historian. In fact, if you think YOU'RE historian, or at least better at making up captions than me, why don't you jump on board the interactive participation blog wagon an write your OWN caption for this photo. Then we'll see who really knows their history, and who's just a lying creator of fiction. Really, post some captions, let's see what you got. Either way, accurate caption or not, this picture is awesome. And really old. Nice find txRUNNERgirl!

So...the Olympics are over, but we've still got one more for you from Beijing courtesy of Mr. Kirby Lee before I revert back to the regular riff-raff of events that we'll just have to tolerate for the next four years before London rolls around. Don’t worry, it’ll fly by. So here it is, you're last Olympics photo for a very long time!

Pretty sweet eh? But you’re probably asking yourself, what kind of elfin magic did he use to make that sweet time-warp effect, right? It's called a ‘starburst’ effect, and here's how you do it: Set you're camera to a slow shutter speed like 1/60th or so. Then, at the same moment that you push the shutter button, zoom in on your subject with your telephoto lens. Try it at home kids!

Pictures of runners doing funny things like wearing too much sun screen and tying their shoes while the gun's going off are great, and they're usually what I bank on for this little thing we call Photo of the Week. But do you know what's even better than tomfoolery and awkward speed suits? Total domination, that's what. And when you think about total domination, and then think about this week's Olympic track and field competition, and then maybe even add in there a thought about tomfoolery, the name that should pop into your head is Usain Bolt. And when you look for a picture of total domination via Usain Bolt, one needs look no further than this photo by Chang W. Lee of The New York Times.

Bolt laid down so much domination in the men’s 200m final last night that the other competitors didn't even make it into the same frame as him as he leaned across the finish line in world record time. Now that's what I call a portrait of domination.

Another thing that make this photo extra cool: The photographer uses the vertical finish line to divide the frame into the golden ratio, where the ratio between the sum of the two sections and the longer section is the same as the ratio between the longer section and the shorter section. Don't think I could have explained that in a more complicated way if I tried. Whatever, it's math stuff, and we all know that most math majors are a little short on friends.

What's really important is that Usain Bolt broke Michael Johnson's world record in the 200m tonight and it was friggin awesome!

To check out more of the NY Time's photos from this week's Olympic action, move your mouse cursor over and depress the left button with your pointer finger here. 

Somewhere on the sidelines you know this kid's coach is having a small brain aneurysm. What I really like about this shot is that not only is guy tying his shoes completely oblivious to the race that's about to leave the line, but his teammate is staying behind as well just to make sure he double knots. But I have to give them props for their gutsy strategy; there is no better way to avoid false starts and trip-ups than to wait until after the gun goes off to start running. Bold. So, Obi Harriman, if that's you on the late lace-up, I salute your confidence; and if it isn't you, nice photo find.

Alright ya'll, I've got a couple of gems here for you. The first one's of a ripped naked person, and the second is of a blistering fast elderly woman, so I think everyone's photographic needs should be pretty well covered. This first one is part of an ad campaign for Powerade that features several members of Britain's olympic team going through the motions of their sport in the nude, giving us common folk a unique view of all the muscles we never knew we didn't have. I think the slogan for the campaign is something like "Powerade: It'll make you want to exercise—without pants!" Sounds like a winning formula to me. Check out the rest of the photos from the campaign here.

The second image of the week was taken at this weekend's Hayward Classic where 69-year-old Becky Sisley rocketed through the 80-meter short hurdles in a time of 17.33. It would be awesome to have Sisley as your grandmother because then you could go around to fast-twitch impaired people like myself and say "You're so slow my grandma could beat you!" And she probably could. Seriously. To see more photos from this weekend's meet, go here.

Alright everyone, that's it for this week. I'm going to go do some hurdle drills now just in case I find myself in an unexpected throwdown with Sisley and her crew. I really would get beat.

Though I'm sure we can all agree that pictures random dudes wearing unfortunate speed suits and alligator heads are very important to our sport, this week I figured it was probably a good idea to feature a photo that was actually newsworthy/remotely related to running. So this week's winner is a shot taken by our good friend Kirby Lee of Pamela Jelimo winning the women's 800m in 1:54.97 at the Meeting Gaz de France. Check out the more of Kirby's pics from the meet here.

However, as great as professional athletes and newsworthy photos are, I just can't ignore the awesomely random stuff that always manages to find it's way onto our photo page. As a thoroughbred red-head, I've grown to accustomed to dousing myself in SPF 90 before I leave the protective shelter of my house, and this next photo really struck a chord with me because that's exactly what I look like anytime I go outside – even at night. So as a compliment to Kirby's photo, here's a photo of a guy with WAY too much sunscreen on.