Faking it. Again.

The latest issue of Singletrack magazine just hit the shelves in the UK – once again it’s their yearly photo annual, and them being the nice chaps they are they ran a feature of mine, as part of the ‘Scenes’ theme for the issue.

I got the call to shoot the feature, based on night-riding on the North Shore, at the beginning of September – plenty of time on paper but a hectic schedule compressed the time available to three consecutive evenings in early October.  My plan was to grab shots on each of the three local mountains, and I wanted shots that weren’t the usual clichéd “trail of light” and blur that were typical of the majority of night riding shots out there.  No, I was looking for sharp shots that really brought across the darkness and isolation of riding technical trails with just a headlight for company.

Trouble is, it turns out those headlights really aren’t all that bright, in a photographic sense of the word.  There simply wasn’t enough light available to capture what I wanted, the pools of brightness around a sharp rider I saw in my head were reduced to noisy mush by the high ISOs and slow shutter speeds required.  Time to fake it then, once again, by bringing in a helping hand from some choice flash placement.  Cheating in the name of ‘art’.

Two things became apparent pretty quickly:

1. Lugging a lighting case, giant softbox and power pack down steep slopes and through forests in the pitch black is not fun at all.
2. It’s really easy to over-gun that light and have it spewing all over everywhere, lighting up the whole scene instead of the tight patterns I was looking for.  This would need some proper thought.

Here’s a few of the shots we made for the article, alongside the setups that seemed to work best for what I was trying to convey:

1)  Down the steep

2)  Through the tree

3)  On the log

So there you go;  nothing to it really, but surprisingly tricky and arduous to get what I wanted.  Think I’ll stick to shooting when there’s natural light around when at all possible, but it sure was interesting doing something different.

Check out the other shots, along with my flowery art-w*nk captions (as such things are informally known at the mag) in the current issue, I really did over-do the purple prose on this one, hamming it up to good effect just to try out a different style of writing.  S’all about experimenting, you know.
PS.  More than the usual amount of thanks to Brian and Sven for enduring three s-l-o-w evenings of missed focus, fumbling gear searches and grumpy pack-muling.

Tags: BC, Canada, lighting, mountain biking, night ride, North Shore, published, Singletrack

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