Dan Barham :: Mountain Bike Photography

I’ve been hanging out annoying the North Shore locals now for over a year, and without blowing my own horn too much (not to mention inviting the inevitable irony-related crash), my riding’s progressed leaps and bounds from my first tentative pedal strokes of 2007. My current bike, a Trek Session 77, is beautifully plush and responsive, but a tad on the ‘bomb proof’ end of the weight scale and consequently quite a handful on the tight, technical trails that seem de rigueur out here.

I decided to take my new found (over)confidence and trade ‘down’ to slightly smaller bike - six inches travel instead of seven, a few pounds the other side of forty, and landed myself what seems to be a popular bike - the Specialized SX Trail 2:

Basking in the golden light of an Interior BC sunset

In the couple of weeks I’ve had it, I’ve had the chance to rip it up in a whole range of terrain, from wet, rooty Shore trails to the dusty buff berms of the BC Interior, and I couldn’t be happier. The lighter weight and shorter travel makes the bike leap around under me while I flick it exactly where it needs to go, and the extra granny ring makes pedalling up much less of a chore. To prove I actually do ride bikes occasionally, I’ve even managed to procure the most rare of footage - me the other side of the lens, hitting what I thought was scary-big log gap, but in video-assisted retrospect now looks rather uninspiring:

It was totally bigger in real life, honest

Not that you can really tell it’s me thanks to the blurry video and full-face helmet, maybe I should’ve poached a shot of Berrecloth riding his and claimed it was me…

(A thousand thanks to Cam at NSMB.com and Tony at Specialized for making the magic happen and being full-on stand-up kinda guys)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 10:41 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.