Dan Barham :: Mountain Bike Photography

The second issue of fantastic bike rag Urban Velo was released today, and I’m proud to have one of my shots featuring in their first gallery section. If you haven’t seen Urban Velo, it’s put together by a couple of guys who used to work at Dirt Rag magazine, before leaving to do their own thing. It’s early days, but already they’re putting out a really nice product, it’s interesting, well written and has some nice photos to boot. Well worth checking out.

The shot Jeff chose brought back a flood of memories for me; taken earlier this year in Edmonton, AB, while I was still living there, it depicts Paul Bellows‘ cruiser bike, at night, covered in snow, in what was around -20C temperatures, if I remember rightly (and I hope I do, ‘cos that’s what’s in the caption). Paul is awesome, one of the most genuinely likeable people I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet, and a hardcore rider - I skipped the bike that day and took the bus.

So, I (somewhat self-righteously) wrote a couple of days ago about how I was growing tired of the remote-flashed mountain bike shots that were seemingly the new vogue among new shooters in the industry; of course I neglected to mention there’s a ton of guys who are doing it really well, managing to keep the ‘feel’ of what it is to mountain bike, for me at least, while still getting to play around with some really creative lighting techniques. Seb Rogers is one, I’m sure I’ve linked to it to before, but if you haven’t seen the fantastic blog he writes about being one of the UK’s top working pros, it’s a must read.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I got the slides back from the lab a couple of days ago, and felt it only right to post a few. The best shots I’ve squirreled away to send off to mags, so unfortunately you get the second bests here, but what do you expect for free? With any luck, the ‘A’ shots should be on newsstands at some point in the future.

Knowing how nice the foliage is out on the ‘Sunshine’ Coast, I packed a couple of rolls of Velvia 100, famed for its transformation of greens and red into super-saturated blocks of vibrance. I needed more speed than ISO 100 in the trees, though, so I pushed the film 2 stop to 400 to get the faster shutter speed required (I said ‘faster’, not ‘fast’ - I don’t think I got above 1/60th all day), the added benefit being an extra bump in contrast and saturation, just what I was looking for.

Needless to say, the scans below don’t do the original slides justice, my crappy flatbed scanner really needs replacing with the real-deal at some point, but for now, it’ll do.

What started as a sneaky way to get Google more at home on this site, and therefore show me in search queries, has actually turned into something ‘real’ people read, amazingly.  I’ve had a few requests to turn on comments so all and sundry can also make their mark, so I did.  Be kind.

I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated in recent months with the proliferation of nasty, harsh off-camera flash shots that seems to be the latest fad. “Pocketwizard” radio transmitters, despite running at around $600 for a single transmitter-receiver set, seem to be on most new shooters lists shortly after the camera body itself; they then proceed to head to the nearest bit of forest and blast over-powered artificial light at anything that moves. It’s all well and good, but I can’t help but feel it’s not really representative of what mountain biking means to me - getting out into nature, putting in some quality time getting back to basics. Sure, I’ve used off-camera flash extensively in the past, but nothing beats natural light for capturing the soul of riding bikes.

I’ve been immersing myself in the amazing work of fellow Vancouver bike photographer Stephen Wilde, famed for his unique perspective and shooting style, and felt myself inspired to get back to basics with a film body, fixed 50mm lens and only natural light to work with. The result was refreshing, to say the least - my usual anchor-like camera bag was replaced with a standard riding pack with the camera stuffed in the top, and I found the prime lens forced me to move my feet in an attempt to find the optimal composition with what I had.

Working with film again presented familiar challenges that aren’t necessarily a problem with digital. Not enough light? Rather than push my digital ISO higher, I had to look to ways to use the gloomy ambiance to my advantage, which meant lots of panning or blurred-rider-sharp-background shots, angles I wouldn’t normally consider with my do-everything digi / zoom lens gear. Even nicer is that fact that I haven’t been chained in front of the computer processing them for hours on end, the 2 rolls I shot are currently at the lab, where a chemical-stained technician is doing all the hard work for me. I just have to pick them up, look at them, and spend the rest of the evening doing something else more interesting, like interacting with real people instead of photoshop pixels.

Whether or not the shots come out isn’t really important, getting back to basics this weekend was great, I’ll be doing it more often for sure.

Normally, when my work gets used in magazines, it’s only for the pretty pictures - very occasionally am I allowed to write the captions and even rarer still if I’m given the task of describing them in greater detail for a photo essay or similar.

With that in mind, I was fairly gobsmacked when the Editor of Mountain Biking Magazine asked me for 2000 words on my recent trip to Fruita, CO, to back up the shots I’d taken down there. Having never really written much since English classes in high school, it took me an inordinately large amount of time (mainly due to a not insignificant amount of procrastination), but I’m fairly happy with the end result. Thankfully, so are the mag - they ran it as their first cover feature story, albeit with a change in the title, presumably for space reasons; I’d originally entitled it “Photo Gimps and the Angry Midget”.

Here’s some low res scans, go hunt out the mag, then tell me how bad my grammar is. As an added bonus, there’s a bunch of my Sea Otter shots in there too, huzzah!