Dan Barham :: Mountain Bike Photography

I’m pretty tough on most of my camera gear, not through any malicious intent nor any real desire to spend more than I have to get the job done, but simply because more often than not, I’m shooting in some pretty crappy conditions. Rain, damp, mud, grit and grime - they all conspire against me to fog lenses, short batteries and gunk up controls, and no place has my local sales rep rubbing his hands with glee like the North Shore.

I’ve always shot primarily with a Canon 1D Mark 2, a true tank of a body that plows through adverse conditions like a steam train, with barely a mark on her to show for it. I’ve dropped it, I’ve subjected it to deluges, left it in a puddle of mud, and it’s still running as sweet as the day I got it (you should note at this point I’m superstitiously touching every piece of wood I can find). It’s still my go-to gear when I need to get the job done, but sometimes, it’s just too heavy, too bulky or just plain too conspicuous to use - thirty mile backcountry epics are hard enough at the best of times, and I need all the weight savings I can get.

So it’s new body time.  I had a quick browse through the Canon catalogue, closed my eyes and stuck a pin in the page, and came up with a 40D - their top-of-the-line ‘prosumer’ model. It’s got a bunch of features that really show the advance of technology, like the 3″ screen, 14-bit colour capture and semi-decent weather sealing, and I’m sure it’ll perform admirably as a backup.  Of course, I’m not stupid enough to roll into a paying gig without trying it out first, so when I got a call from NSMB’s Jerry Willows to go shoot a trail he’d built, it seemed like the perfect test scenario for shots in the dank, damp forest, like this:

The result? It worked like a camera should, and hasn’t kicked the bucket yet. Sounds like a success*.

Oh, and if you were wondering about what I meant about being hard on gear, here’s my poor abused fisheye after I knocked ninety percent of the mud, grit and sticks off it:

Whoops.

* Note to the Camera Gear Karma Gods, if you’re reading this, please don’t take it as an invite to trash everything in my bag; I’m poor enough already.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 11:55 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.