Dan Barham :: Mountain Bike Photography

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 7:25 am 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.