UCLAN Colour Run

This weekend was one of the most exciting but unconventional shoots I have ever done. I was at UCLAN Sports Arena shooting a colour run with Preston Photographic Society, which people of all ages participated in to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Charity.

What’s a colour run you ask? It’s a new craze where people run a 5K and get coloured powder thrown over them throughout the race and it’s brilliant to photograph. The key to taking a great image at this event is trying to press the shutter as the volunteer throws coloured powder at the runner and then either boosting up the contrast or saturation on photoshop to enhance the colour burst effect.

Now to the race its self, before the race starts the runners each have a bag of coloured powder to throw up into the air for dramatic effect and to give us photographers a chance to set the scene of the event. For this throw I managed to acquire a nice position on the stage, which gave me the ability to see all the runners but to only focus on a few as, I was using my 55-200mm Zoom Lens. What I loved about this particular starting set-up is that there were about fifteen photographers but we all managed to get a different perspective of the starting throw.

I started off at the yellow station where I ended up with my favourite shot of the day as I learnt that the most striking shots were those with the most colours and I managed to capture the volunteers throwing yellow powder at a lone runner.

All in all what I liked about the day is that this shoot was completely different to anything I’d done before and I loved looking at the images after the shoot and spending time editing a selection of the images from each of the stations the yellow, the red and the multi-coloured. I also found it interesting to see that every photographer saw the colours with a different eye, a different view of this world in a colour burst.

So if you are a photographer I recommend that you make it your mission to have a go at shooting a colour run. If not I suggest that you participate whether it’s for charity or for fun.

Below is a selection of my photos from this event depicting my photography at every stage of the race: