Sunrise, Sunset and a Dog Named Lobo on the Lone Star Hiking Trail
Two natural-light shoots in 72 hours for Trail Runner Magazine, and how to frame a runner wide, head-on and in a group.
In March 2017, I got a call from a publication I'd worked with years before: Trail Runner Magazine. Their June 2017 issue had a feature on trails close to some of the biggest cities in the United States, and since Houston is one of the largest cities in the country, they needed shots along one of the bigger trails in the area, the Lone Star Hiking Trail. So I grabbed my F-Stop Tilopa bag, called my good friend, ultrarunner Ronnie Delzer, and some of the great people at our local lululemon, and asked them to follow me into the tall pines north of Houston.
Sunrise with Ronnie
Because of timing, we split the shoot into two outings. Only sunrise worked for Ronnie, and I really wanted to shoot him, both for his own exposure (he wins 100-mile races and was the 2017 USATF 100-mile trail national champion) and because he looks effortless on the trails. We met before dawn and drove to a spot I'd picked near Lake Conroe. It was close and looked like it wouldn't be too overgrown, the way the woods around here can get.
It was chilly enough that I sent Ronnie off running to stay warm while we waited for more light. Knowing the magazine's style, I'd left my lights at home and planned to use only the warm tones of morning light. That meant I needed plenty of it, so I could raise my shutter speed and stop the action as he flew by. I wanted three kinds of images: pulled back for more of a landscape view (as much as you can get in thick pines), a wide shot of Ronnie running past, and a head-on shot of him running through the trees, compressed at a long focal length.
I started with the pulled-back images, trying to catch sunlight coming through the morning haze created by all the pine pollen. (A March shoot in a pine forest is not for anyone with serious allergies. We get a lot of pollen in Houston!) I was glad I'd sent Ronnie ahead, because he found a better spot than I had: a slight incline in the trail that let me get a little above him and show more of the tall pines that line the trail.
Next we moved to a less dense part of the forest and worked shots of him blowing past me at ground level, emphasizing the height of the pines around us, and finished with arguably my favorite set: Ronnie blasting through the trees. For these I used the Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 at a fairly wide aperture. Because of the wide angle, I wasn't worried about shallow depth of field; the relative depth more than made up for it. I stayed between 16mm and 20mm to fit everything I wanted into the frame while keeping the distortion from becoming unbearable to the eye.
Then I switched to the big daddy, the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8, for the head-on shots. The goal was to shoot around 200mm, wide open at f/2.8 and well back from Ronnie, in AI Servo at a high frame rate so the camera's autofocus could track him. I'd done this before in Colorado with Trail Runner and liked the results. You have to back off a long way to zoom in like this, especially if you want to show the landscape around the runner, but it was worth all the shouting back and forth.
The last piece of shooting head-on is the timing of the stride. I fire a little earlier than I would from the side, so the runner doesn't look like they're missing a leg or standing like a flamingo. I move the shutter slightly closer to the take-off point of the stride rather than just before the front foot lands.
Sunset with the lululemon crew
With those in the bag, we headed home and off to work for the day, and I planned the evening shoot with the lululemon crew around sunset in a completely different part of the forest.
For this part, I wanted a group running together through the woods. Groups are always harder: you have to manage spacing, match strides, and make sure several pairs of eyes are pointed the right way at the right point in the stride. With some runners it's flawless; with others it's painful to coordinate. I've shot pros and local amateurs and seen the best and worst from both, so I don't think it depends on how good the runners are. Sometimes it just works, and sometimes it doesn't. With this group I'd guess we were in sync 50 to 60 percent of the time, which I'll call a win any day with three runners in one frame.
We also had a bonus: my friend Jaimee brought her running buddy, her dog Lobo. As soon as I found out, I was determined to get Lobo into the magazine.
Just as with Ronnie, I wanted pulled-back shots, closer wide shots and compressed telephoto shots to give the magazine choices, using the same pattern and equipment. The hardest part was the location. We went farther along the trail, and the undergrowth was dense along the whole stretch I'd chosen. Normally I'd have scouted more, but the timeline was tight. I was flying to LA the next day, so from the editor's call to finished images was about 72 hours: one day to plan, one to shoot and one to edit (on a plane), while working my day job on two of those days. In a perfect world, I'd have grabbed my mountain bike and nailed down the locations before ever bringing gear and runners out.
After hiking a bit, we found an area where more sunlight spilled through the trees and got to work. We had a blast. A huge thank-you to the lululemon Woodlands crew, especially Jaimee Cox, Annie Fletcher and Justin Thomas, for fighting off the mosquitoes with me for an evening of running and photography.
The magazine ran three images across the table of contents, a full page of Ronnie blasting through the trees and, yes, Lobo, in the group shot of the lululemon crew out for an evening run on the Lone Star Hiking Trail. I love working with this publication.
Originally published on the Ruddock Visuals blog, January 2018. Lightly edited in 2026.