Dan Barham :: Mountain Bike Photography

Thanks, you bastard.  I liked that bike.

I’m now on day three of my nine day stay in Whistler, covering this year’s Kokanee Crankworx festival for UK-based mountain bike website bikemagic.com. So far the weather hasn’t really co-operated, and I’m still waiting to grab a quick run on my underused bike, but apart from that it’s all going swimmingly.

My daily reports are hitting the front page as-and-when they get subbed, indeed Day 1 is already up there.

I don’t have much to do with the “dark side” of the sport (that’s road cycling to everyone else), but I have to admit it holds a certain intrigue; while I can’t deny that I find mountain biking more interesting, there’s definitely a grace and sense of purpose that’s hard to find in the knobby-tired world.

When a planned trail ride was stymied by the recent inclement weather, I took the opportunity to head over to downtown to go shoot the annual Tour de Gastown that happened to be taking place that evening. Hoping to capitalise on the greasy, wet conditions, and not shooting for any particular purpose or client, I wanted to try and capture the event in a non-standard manner - rather than tight crops of winning riders and the usual boring race pictures, I wanted something representative of how I witnessed the event. If anything, it’d be good practice for my impending event-a-thon at Crankworx this coming week.

I shot loose crops, and deliberately kept everything dark to emphasize the ‘grim’. Here’s a few from my take that haven’t been snapped up by various mags yet.

They’re a funny bunch at Bike Magazine, as they do things differently from the majority of the other mags I deal with on a regular basis. Rather than them telling me what they like, what they’d like to run and when, they flip that all on its head, and I just send them slides and CDs of digital images in the vague hope something with catch the eye of the photo editors there. With one of the larger circulations in the industry (not to mention some of the best page rates) they can afford to do things their way, I guess.

It can be a frustrating experience at times, but conversely I get a regular 6 week thrill when the new mag arrives, and I pore through the pages looking for evidence of my work. This month was of particular interest - the yearly Photo Annual issue is one that’s traditionally devoted solely to the aspect of capturing the sport in still images, and it’s a chance to see the finest shots of the year from all the big name photographers. Last year I managed to grace the gallery with a solitary eighth-page thumbnail, so this year I was keen to beat the record - and succeeded. Two shots of mine ran, one of Andreu Lacondeguy at Sea Otter, California this year, the other of a girl I met watching the TransRockies race last year in Sparwood, BC. They didn’t run as big as I’d hoped, but hey, it’s better than a kick in the teeth.

Maybe next year I can break into the dizzy heights of a full-pager.