In lieu of any real action here’s some numbers to crunch:

• 2 - hours we waited for golden light
• 1 - trailside beer consumed while doing so
• 1 - wood tick removed from my leg, luckily before it bit me.  I hate ticks.
• 5 - cotton buds required to clean my ears of all the dust

Jerry Willows hucks over a rock step down

Check out NSMB.com’s Jerry Willows’ blog about our shoot with legendary North Shore builder / filmer Digger last week:

North Shore Photo / Vid Jam

The next installment of the always awesome Kranked series is a mere two weeks away - Kranked 8: Revolve is slated for a June 1st release and from what I’ve seen already it’s destined to be the best yet.  Here’s the trailer for those of you who haven’t seen it yet - be sure to set your underpants to ’stun’:

Every single bit of trail needs to be picture-perfect

Kyle's always stoked to drop in one more time

A sneaky teaser shot of one of the most insane structures I've ever seen. You won't believe your eyes when you see what we got.

Not only can Dylan shred at a pro level, he's an amazing VT editor as well.

It's often difficult to appreciate the size of some of these features without a sense of scale

Thank God for waterproof boots. I spend a lot of time in rivers.

A lot of my shots wouldn't be possible without help - Laura and Dan are killer assistants.

Wait till you see what they saw...

Ever seen a grown man freak out before a few hundred people, stammer wildly then run off stage in tears? Well your lucky night could well be February 26th, when I present a slideshow of my images as part of the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival.

Based loosely on the notion of me actually thinking most aspects of mountain biking are kinda cool, it’s a 4 minute slideshow with music followed by 5 minutes Q&A, where I desperately try to pretend I know what I’m talking about.  Chance of looking foolish I’m putting at a conservative 95%.

Details are here, if you’re in the area and can make it down, it’d be great to see you!

Back page

The heady heights of page 17

I don’t often see my shots in newspapers, so this one’s got quite a novelty right now.

Yep, the Todmorden cyclocross race this past weekend was a perfect way to round off my two week vacation back in the old country.  Nice to shoot something “gritty” for a change; here’s a few from the B-roll…

http://twitter.com/danbarham/

Hang on, before you disappear in disgust, hear me out;  these shots aren’t rejects in the out-of-focus, motion blurred or badly composed category (although I’ve got plenty of those too), but images that for one reason or another didn’t work out.  Here’s my eight favourites from the bunch that went nowhere; as normal you can click on ‘em to make ‘em bigger-er…

Steve Peat, Sea Otter 2008

The Dual Slalom course at Sea Otter is a crowded, cluttered place, where photographers, spectators and competitors all vie for position on a tiny patch of land.  Getting clean backgrounds is somewhat of a futile task, so I tried to make the audience part of the picture by including the assembled peanut gallery.

Gee Atherton, Red Bull Rampage

There’s no doubting that each of the riders in this year’s Red Bull Rampage earned their paycheck with their death-defying abilities, but no-one can argue it wouldn’t be nice to have a helper pushing your bike around.

On Top Of The World, Lillooet, BC

When I agreed to do a heli-drop on an unridden mountain on the outskirts of Lillooet, BC, I had no idea the grandeur and scale of the backdrop to our ride.  Brian Earle and Chris Kelly try not to get too distracted.

Last Light On The Okanagan

This was a great day - deep in the heart of wine country, fantastic twisting singletrack and… no decent light.  Undeterred we stuck with it, and were rewarded with a tiny ten minute window of gorgeous golden light, at the most scenic part of the trail.

Evening Reflection

Curtis Robinson and Mike Kinrade skirt the lakeside at the end of long, long Interior BC descent.

Specialized All Over It

Kyle Strait footplants right in front of his sponsor’s giant logo.

Off-road Sidecar Madness

The story behind this shot is arguably more interesting than the image itself - while down in North Carolina shooting a feature for Bike Magazine on the Smoke Bikes crew, we were actually meant to be documenting their unique brand of fixed-gear craziness.  One look at the regular-geared sidecar mountain bikes nestled in their garage was enough to convince me we needed to shoot them regardless.  Fast-forward twenty four hours and I’m precariously perched in the passenger seat of one, facing backwards and desperately trying to focus through the camera’s viewfinder despite the trail whizzing by at an alarming pace.  I’m claiming the first bicycle sidecar-mounted remote flash on this one, too.

Backcountry Alaska

The word “epic” is bandied around far too much these days, but the Upper Russian Lakes trail in Alaska is definitely deserving.  This was the last shot on the last day of a fantastic trip.

So there they are, hope you like ‘em.  I had a great time making them, and a bunch of other shots you’ve seen here and will see soon, despite the grumbling that anyone who’s caught me on a bad day has to endure.  Thanks to everyone who’s followed this blog over the last year, here’s to a great 2009!

Out now in Singletrack #45

The latest issue of Singletrack magazine just hit the shelves in the UK - once again it’s their yearly photo annual, and them being the nice chaps they are they ran a feature of mine, as part of the ‘Scenes’ theme for the issue.

I got the call to shoot the feature, based on night-riding on the North Shore, at the beginning of September - plenty of time on paper but a hectic schedule compressed the time available to three consecutive evenings in early October.  My plan was to grab shots on each of the three local mountains, and I wanted shots that weren’t the usual clichéd “trail of light” and blur that were typical of the majority of night riding shots out there.  No, I was looking for sharp shots that really brought across the darkness and isolation of riding technical trails with just a headlight for company.

Trouble is, it turns out those headlights really aren’t all that bright, in a photographic sense of the word.  There simply wasn’t enough light available to capture what I wanted, the pools of brightness around a sharp rider I saw in my head were reduced to noisy mush by the high ISOs and slow shutter speeds required.  Time to fake it then, once again, by bringing in a helping hand from some choice flash placement.  Cheating in the name of ‘art’.

Two things became apparent pretty quickly:

1. Lugging a lighting case, giant softbox and power pack down steep slopes and through forests in the pitch black is not fun at all.
2. It’s really easy to over-gun that light and have it spewing all over everywhere, lighting up the whole scene instead of the tight patterns I was looking for.  This would need some proper thought.

Here’s a few of the shots we made for the article, alongside the setups that seemed to work best for what I was trying to convey:

1)  Down the steep

Showing steep slopes is tricky when you can't see 'em

Gridded softbox, close from above / overhead for a flood that didn't spread too far

2)  Through the tree

I wanted definition on rider here, with just a hint of the tree and shrubs

Gridded softbox with even tighter spread thanks to the flag, and a hard rim light to give more of an outline to Brian

3)  On the log

I wanted a look of concetration to imply the balance, so we needed more of a fill on the face

Good ol' softbox doing what it does best

So there you go;  nothing to it really, but surprisingly tricky and arduous to get what I wanted.  Think I’ll stick to shooting when there’s natural light around when at all possible, but it sure was interesting doing something different.

Check out the other shots, along with my flowery art-w*nk captions (as such things are informally known at the mag) in the current issue, I really did over-do the purple prose on this one, hamming it up to good effect just to try out a different style of writing.  S’all about experimenting, you know.
PS.  More than the usual amount of thanks to Brian and Sven for enduring three s-l-o-w evenings of missed focus, fumbling gear searches and grumpy pack-muling.

With that in mind, I headed off on a foliage-hunting mission to two separate locations in the last week, at two completely opposite ends of the continent.  First up was a few days on Vancouver Island, shooting a couple of local rippers there for a story that’s already up on NSMB.com:

Sniping Ken through the foliage

Layering up the greens

"Dangerous Curves" - a work of trail building art

After that, enjoyed a couple of days break then hopped a flight out to the East Coast of the ‘States, where my good friend Chris picked me up and drove us to her new home in New Hampshire, a place so mind-bogglingly beautiful at this time of year it’s hard to know where to start:

Chris is learning to DH and loving every moment

Leaves on the line

Yes, they really were this colour

Photo opportunities round every corner

With colours and light like this, who needs summer?