Sold a pic to Veltec today, a German company mainly specializing in making wheel sets.  The pic shows Mario Koch rocking the Isar Trials back in April this year just at a spot where some of the locals had built a log jump.  The jumps come and go all the time down by the Isar, depending on the never ending tensions between the walkers and Free-riders. Walkers kick them down, riders build them back up again some place else.

Pic taken using a Nikon D700 with the Nikkor 16mm fisheye and two flashes; one on a high tripod off right, the other on a lower stand off left, both wrapping Mario to give consistent front to back light and to freeze him in the panning. It was kind of close (again) and the V-TWO wheelset was certainly in my face!  Banner pic is below…

Misty trail from Big Col on Vimeo.

Was a great day in the mountains with Fabi and Max.  Been wanting to do some more video for a while, especially on the mountain trails. We did the killer climb in about 3 hours through cloudy weather. Cloudy on the climb was cool, and the weather forecast did say it would clear in the afternoon. Bit it didn’t clear and remained misty and damp. Not the most perfect light for filming. Also rained for about an hour half way down so lost a bit of footage I could of had. Anyhow, it’s certainly a legendary trail and one of the best on planet Earth. Want to do it again soon. And, yes, Max is just insane.

Filmed using a Panasonic GH1 and lenses 7-14mm, 14-140mm and Nikon 50mm and 85mm f/1.8′s.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 16mm fisheye + some flash.

This is one of my favourite pics for a while. One of the requirements in a recent bike test down at Bozen was to take a pic of the 2010 Fox 36 Floats. Late afternoon found us trail surfing past a spot in the woods where the sunlight was casting through the trees and across a spot with leaves. Light looked beautiful. Set up one flash on the left and Mad Max was right behind my left shoulder with flash #2. One of the things I like about Schlecker is that you can tell him a spot to hit and he can horse down the trail and hit it with millimeter precision. Which is kind of handy when there’s €1.6k of bare Nikon glass in very close vicinity. Got to be careful with wides, of course, since putting wheels in the corners is usually not a good idea due to heavy distortion but, since the subject was forks, then it worked out quite well here. I love the opposite light shining through the leaves plus the rim lighting it gives off his left leg.  This pic is now published on pages 86/87 of FREERIDE magazine 3/2010.

Panned at 1/100th sec. Tried a few frames on other riders before and wasn’t too happy with the composition because the rider was too central in the frame. Knew I wanted to do something with the wet leaves on the left and the track so then tried to pan positioning the rider more right in the frame. Kinda worked.

Spent the day in the rain down at Leogang yesterday. Just left the flash gear in the car ‘cos I was wanting that wet kind of natural light atmosphere type shot that those Dirt Dudes across at vitalmtb are so fecking good at catching. The rain and deep mud didn’t exactly motivate me to start setting up flashes either. Tried a lot of stuff: shallow DOF, panning wide, panning tele. Tried to cover as many different spots as possible and not to get magnetized to one in particular. Walked past some obvious spots.  Should have spent more time in others. Two great angles were destroyed by walk-in-front-of-the-lens spectators just at trigger time. Had some concerns about the rain and the gear, but it was fine. Pre-focused on tree roots only to find the riders flying over different lines. Some of the marshals seemed to have irate traffic warden syndrome if you were sans-UCI bib, like I was. Anyway, was a cool day and I learnt a lot about how hard it is to nail cool shots of the DH riders on a course like Leogang in the wet.