I finally got around to shooting something that I have been wanting to shoot for a while, freerunning. I met up with Dominic Di Tommaso and a couple of his friends at Middle Head in Sydney for a bit of a late afternoon session. It’s certainly an impressive sport to watch and I look forward to shooting some more soon.
Last weekend was the wonderful James Estate Winery leg of the Shimano GP series. This race is completely different for us as part of its course runs through the vineyards and vats of the winery. It’s also a chance for one of us to go up in an ultralight and see and shoot the race from above. This year I was the lucky one and the flight was fantastic.
The James Estate winery is located in the Hunter Valley to the north of Sydney and is one of Australia’s premier wine producing regions. Luckily it doesn’t seem to share the same weather systems as Sydney though as it rained all weekend in Sydney while we were treated to some glorious weather.
Numbers were down slightly in this race but this was to be expected with the UCI World Cup taking place up in Cairns. This year for the event all the goings on were moved to the campsite area keeeping it all nice and central.
The track runs out to a single track on the edge of the Wollemi National Park. It zig zags around there before making its way back into the vineyard and up and round through the vines. Last year I covered the single track and Gil took the vineyard so this year we decided to swap around. Finding numerous various shots in a vineyard is harder than I had expected.
It was another great event put on by Rocky Trail and one of our favourites on the circuit.
A large highlining project recently took place in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. It was an attempt to set and walk Australia’s longest and highest highline. The line came in at around 70m long and at its highest point was about 220m high. As is normal for the Blue Mountains the line took place in spectacular surroundings.
By the end of the weekend the line was walked but not all in one go so unfortunately the line remains classed as unfinished. I’m sure another attempt will be made on it soon and hopefully then we will see some closure.
Below is a selection of images from the weekend.
Last week I did a shoot with Stephen from Dynamic Dumbells. He is a fitness trainer specialising in personal and group training sessions. Stephen wanted shots of himself balanced upon the edge of somewhere. The shots will be used on his website. He will also be using a shot in a caption this competition to raise money for a children’s hospital.
Below is a small sample of the images we got.
Yesterday I went out for a bit of a play around shooting a couple of friends as they explored a few of the bays around Pittwater in Sydney’s North. I have a few trips coming up that will involve kayaking so I wanted to give things a bit of a test run and try to get some ideas for angles and such.
A damp weekend greeted riders for last weekend’s Rollercoaster and Downhill State Championships at Thredbo. With the mountain bike season drawing to a close for the winter down at Thredbo the decision was made to run the races in the rain anyway. Including the training runs on the Friday the event runs over three consecutive days. Gil and I arrived early on Saturday morning and missed what was proclaimed as a very wet and soggy training session on Friday. Many bike were still hosting a fine decoration of mud though come Saturday morning.
On Saturday the training runs for both the Rollercoaster and the Downhill continued through the morning. The first section of the Rollercoaster track needed to be closed due to an excess of mud and water, it was ankle deep in places. In the afternoon the Rollercoaster got underway. By then the rain had eased a bit. We started shooting at the top then made our way slowly down. Gil covering many of the tight switchbacks on the tracks and me shooting more out in the open. Since we were shooting more for fun we had a good play around with angles and panning shots. Not good if you want to read competitors numbers but fun for us anyways.
After heavy rain overnight all that remained was a couple of low lying clouds which burnt of quickly leaving Sunday to the blue skies. A few training runs in the morning and then straight into the downhill in the afternoon. Both Gil and I shot around the top section of mud and rock gardens. I found myself a great little spot and barely moved for the entire race.
It was the usual dominant faces that took the podiums minus the exceptions that are away for the world cup races at the moment. South Africa was held on the Saturday night while we were down there.
The full gallery of images can be found here on the OuterImage website.
