Getting all Hollywood…

No updates for a couple of weeks signifies one thing – mountain biking’s back on, around here at least. The snow that’s covered local trails for the last few months is fading away for another year, the sun’s shining and the amazing greenery that really makes the local forests seem alive with colour is just beginning to poke through. Times are good.

These past days I’ve been privileged enough to be invited along to a couple of film shoots – out on the Sunshine Coast with the Kranked crew, putting the finishing touches to their seventh film, and on the North Shore with legendary trail builder and filmer ‘Digger’, working on his ninth sequel in his North Shore Extreme series.

It’s not something I was entirely relishing, to be honest. While the opportunity for some fantastic shots was higher than ever, I’ve often been reluctant to share locations with video filmers – it can be tricky for all involved as we each try to stay out of each other’s shots, and watching where you stand and where you point a lens can be restrictive. Thankfully working with Bjorn and Digger didn’t prove to be anything other than a delight, and I bagged a number of images that I’m hoping mags will run after the films’ premieres.

Here’s a few behind the scenes shots to whet your appetites:

Kranked film maker Bjorn Enga and Dylan Dunkerton tinkering with a home-made (yet fantastically engineered) cable camera

All the cake and apples you can eat if you’re a pro rider…

I’m not a big fan of remote flash, as I’ve mentioned more times than I care to remember, but the fact is sometimes it does come in handy. It’s in those situations when it would be awesome if the $1000 radio remote kit I purchased actually worked reliably, really it would. See that long cable in my hands? That’s a 30 foot long backup sync cable that I had to trail through the forest like the good old days. Way to suck, PocketWizards.

“Is it working now?” Jerry Willows comparing the number of flash pops to the number of curse words coming out of my mouth.

“How about if you hold it, Digger?”

… Still didn’t work.

Gave up, did it the old fashioned way. Grain is the new black, didn’t you know?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Professional Mountain Bike Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.