A French Connection

Last bank holiday weekend I got back in touch with the guys that I'd met at the Photogravity Event last time I was in Scotland and arranged another day's shooting at Innerleithen.

I met up with Alex and Valentin and decided to try shooting mainly on The Matador run again. This meant that we knew where would work (and I knew what I wanted to correct/improve from the last time) and roughly how long we would take.

First up (after we hiked, chatted and pushed our way to the top: I'm riding next time, walking takes ages!) was the road jump. I'd shot this before and as mentioned in the previous post, there were a few things I wanted to do differently this time; less frames and better framing being the main two.

I'm much happier with this shot. I'd be even happoer if there was more water for more reflections or it was shot later in the day when the sun should shine almost directly along the road... But moving the goal posts is what keep this interesting isn't it?

I also shot one of my favourites of the day before we moved on down into the woods, it was one of the few shots that knew would work in black and white as soon as I saw the gap in the trees:

In to the trees and things got a bit more technical: It's dark in there, and the bright sky behind the trees wasn't doing the metering any favours either. I ended up shooting at iso800 and higher just to try and get some ambient light in the shot.

It also meant I had to get a flash out. I bungeed it to a tree at about 6' up with and metered to my hand at a rough guess as to where I wanted to shoot the rider's head. As the trees are tightly packed in and I was going to be shooting close to the trail (and bike) I switched to my 20D with 10-22 lens (the EF-S fit doesn't work on the 1D). Unfortunately this did mean more chance of getting the flash in shot, but I think, in this shot anyways, it's almost acceptable:

It had taken us about two hours by this point and we'd only shot at two locations!

As we moved down the hill we did stop and shoot more, I'm not posting them all here though as they're already on Flickr

Huge amounts of respect and thanks to Alex and Valentin for having the patience and energy to push back up and keep riding the same line again and again for me.

This is why it's difficult to shoot mountain bikes on regular rides: Set up time takes a while, the first shot isn't always the shot either. Patience and erseverence is required. I've no idea how many times we shot each location corner but it was a lot, thanks guys.

By the time we'd spent one trip down from top to bottom we'd been at it for about 4hrs. None of us had had any food either (mental note for next time). As I was inhaling a burger from the van in the car park the weather closed in and the rain started. We decided to call it a day there and try meet up again later in the summer in some bigger, drier, (french?) mountains.

I really enjoyed the proper shoot instead of the more usual race coverage that I've been doing this season. The race stuff is great practice but having good riders who understand that, just for once, they're not going to be hammering all the way down the run, is fantastic.