What’s going on

With no races booked in this weekend I decided on a quiet weekend at home. I didn’t realise the East Coast Titles were on at Greenvalleys MTB Park which would have been fun but sometimes a bit of downtime is needed anyway. My relaxation however usually involves getting out and taking photos somewhere. This weekend I kept it close to home. I took myself out to the local trails and caught up with the local crew that I hadn’t seen for a while.

The guys were doing shuttle runs up and powering it back down the track. I found myself a nice location and shot them as they went on by. Each lap they did I changed it a bit and found another spot. It’s a great little corner with plenty of features to shoot all within a stones throw. But a note, be sure and take your mosquito repellent. There seems to be a great swarm that lives around there. I also managed to find a tick chomping down on my leg. Bug season is upon us!!

I find getting out on the local trails is a good chance for me to practice playing with some lighting setups.  It also helps me to just keep my eye in. I find it amazing how quickly I start to get rusty if I don’t go out shooting a particular sport on a regular basis. One of the things I am trying at the moment is to step away a bit from using my flashes. I love using my flashes and they certainly have their place but I am always aware that I use them at times to an excess. So one of my projects at the moment is to try and define to myself when to use them and when to go with out. 

Here’s a couple of shots from the morning. Some more can be found in the galleries here

Last week I went out with mountain biker Steve from Little Rider Lane. Steve messaged me saying that he had a new light from Full Beam Australia, the Trail LED Halo, that he needed to test and wondered if I would like to join him. I have been looking to add to my mountain biking series, Night Riders, so thought it was a good chance to do so. We met at 9.30pm when it was nice and dark at a trail near Belrose and headed out from there.

The Halo light was a beast of a machine. So much so that for most of the shots we had to power it down so we wouldn’t over-expose the landscape around him. I had a couple of other lights from my little bag’o’tricks with me as well. I decided against taking my big strobes out with me and instead took only a couple of speedlights and my Nao headlight from Petzl. This is a great little light as it adjusts to level of brightness it needs to be. For those that understand speedlights it is like having your speedlight set on TTL.  I used this for the shots of the Steve with the big streams of light behind him. I used the flashes when I wanted to freeze him in place.

The first shot below was a test shot done without flashes. You can see the rider but only if you look really closely. On the next shot we took some levels and set the flashes. The third is the final shot picking up the trail of his headlight and the flashes freezing him in place.

For the next couple of shots I threw on my headlight and lit Steve as he went by me which creates the nice wide light trails. Again I used the flashes to freeze the rider. Unfortunately, the light from his headlight lit the trail so well that I am missing the bike in the shot. The final shot is a faster exposure and lit with just the flashes and his headlight.

[ngg_images source=”galleries” container_ids=”7″ display_type=”photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails” override_thumbnail_settings=”0″ thumbnail_width=”100″ thumbnail_height=”75″ thumbnail_crop=”1″ images_per_page=”20″ number_of_columns=”0″ ajax_pagination=”0″ show_all_in_lightbox=”0″ use_imagebrowser_effect=”0″ show_slideshow_link=”1″ slideshow_link_text=”[Show as slideshow]” ngg_triggers_display=”never” ngg_proofing_display=”0″ is_ecommerce_enabled=”1″ order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]