Seb Rogers: mountain bike photography

Business as usual. Well, almost

It's been a quiet couple of months on the blog. I've had my reasons, but just because i haven't been posting here it doesn't mean I've been slacking off. Quite the opposite, in fact. I've been shooting plenty, have notched up five or so covers (of which, more another time) and have plenty more still to come.

By way of proof, here's a few of my recently published pics. Think of them as visual hold music while I attempt to shuffle things back into an order that vaguely resembles normality...

Chris Smith samples the spring air. Client: Mountain Biking UK

Nikon D3, 80-200mm f/2.8, 1/320sec f/10 @ ISO200, two radio slaves

 

Yep, it's as wet as it looks. My D3 still needs some attention as a result of this shoot... and I discovered the limits of Goretex trousers by lying in a succession of ditches. Client: Tri Plus

Nikon D3, 17-35mm f/2.8, 1/320sec f/9 @ ISO400, two radio slaves

Alpine singletrack. Can't beat it. Thirty minutes after shooting this the fog rolled in and we beat a hasty retreat down the mountain. Client: personal work, but published in What Mountain Bike

Nikon D300, 50-150mm f/2.8, 1/800sec f/6.3 @ ISO200

Alpine high

I love it when a plan comes together. Last week's Alps photo course was, by all accounts, a huge success. Amongst the comments and feedback I've received are these:

'I thoroughly enjoyed the course, and I learned a lot, and had great fun too!'

'The whole week was a wonderful experience, and it was a major disappointment to return home'

You can read more first-hand experiences from the whole week here.

To be honest, I'm breathing a small sigh of relief. Although I was certain I'd picked the right location and had every confidence in our hosts, trailAddiction, it was a new venture for me: new location, extended hours and an (intentionally) small group size. We were usually first out of the door and last back in, grabbing food with our fellow chalet riders before huddling over laptops for the rest of the evening... and then doing the whole lot all over again. Intense.

But the results were well worth the effort. Early mornings, late nights, sunburn and far too many chocolate croissants are all a small price to pay for the images that David, Niels and Linda brought back. There's already talk of a repeat course next year...

Can you say 'just one more time?'

Nikon D300, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1/2500sec f/4 @ ISO200

That'll be Mont Blanc, then...

Canon EOS 1DIII, 70-200mm f/2.8, 1/250sec f/10 @ ISO200

Niels ladles on the cheese

Sony A100, lens unrecorded, 1/200sec f/16 @ ISO200

Linda gets acquainted with her camera's dynamic range. And the pic's not bad, either...

Nikon D80, 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6, 1/200sec f/5 @ ISO200, single radio slave

Just another day at the office

Linda, Niels, David and Alistair. Hard at work. Fuji Finepix F11, happysnap mode (thanks to Ali for the loan of the camera)

Sometimes the only way to stop Ben talking is to point him down a really (really) nice trail. Nikon D300, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1/1000sec f/5 @ ISO200

(If you're wondering what all this is about, you'll find more info (and more pics) here.)

Just one of those days

Photoshoots are subject to the same vagaries as any job. There are good days when everything goes well and the shots just keep coming. The light's great, the riders are enjoying themselves, the location is working out and my memory cards are filling up fast.

And then there are the bad days. The light's crap, the riders aren't motivated, the location's not working and it's hard just to get a single decent shot in the can. And on those days, it's my job to make sure that after all the swearing and frustration, the end result is nearly as good as the results from a good day.

The two-day shoot I organised earlier this week definitely fell into the 'bad day' category. In fact, I can't remember the last time so much went wrong on a single shoot. It kicked off with one of the two riders calling in sick with swine flu, although I didn't worry too much about that since Ben, the other rider, managed to find a stand-in at short notice. Who spent three hours waiting for us in the wrong carpark (with a broken mobile phone, so we couldn't reach him) before deciding we weren't going to turn up and going home.

As if that weren't bad enough, the weather consistently failed to cooperate. 'Heavy showers with sunny intervals' turned out to mean 'persistent rain with half an hour of sun at some random point during the day'. Having had the first day almost completely rained off (we were out of the door by 6am and had some shots in the can before breakfast, in anticipation of a wet day), the second day turned out to be nearly as bad. But with just half a dozen key shots ticked off my list, we couldn't afford another day spent in the car and the pub. My insistence that a carpet of sheep shit-covered grass and a roof of bracken would make a perfectly adequate shelter was starting to wear a bit thin with Ben...

Still, at least the view was good...

That is, on the rare occasions when we could actually see it...

You might think that AWOL riders and piss-poor weather would be enough in the trial-by-cock-up department. And you'd be right. But fate had another trick up its sleeve, as I discovered when one of my two flashes began intermittently refusing to fire. With indifferent light and only one functioning flash, it was looking increasingly unlikely that I was going to get the job done. 

Crouched under the bracken in pouring rain and gale force winds, talking on my phone to a bemused bloke in Jessops in Leeds about flashguns and trying to work out how I could buy one and get it to the top of a windswept hill in the next couple of hours, it suddenly struck me that the situation was utterly hilarious...

And then the rain eased just enough for us to head on up the hill. The location I'd had in mind turned out to be a blinder, with an incredible ribbon of rock-strewn singletrack above a picture postcard view. The sun came out. My recalcitrant flash worked, occasionally. I shot a couple of dozen pics. A handful are really good.

Job done. One large invoice, one sick rider, one lost rider, one broken flashgun and a lot of worrying and sitting around in the rain later, we've got the single most important picture we drove a 500 mile round trip to get. And that, really is what it's all about.

Oh, the picture? You'll have to wait a few weeks to see it...

The world's most costly crystal ball?

The UK's Met Office - which produces weather forecasts and provides raw weather data for other forecasters - is, as far as I'm aware, one of the world's best at what they do. With the help of some very expensive, very sophisticated supercomputers, their job is to predict the notoriously unpredictable British weather. And, to their credit, they do a pretty good job. Most of the time.

But there are occasions when they still get it wrong, at which point you might just as well try to predict the weather by reading tea leaves (it'd be just as likely to be right). Today was one of those occasions.

With two big shoots to complete and two days in which to do it, I knew today's weather was forecast to be wet much of the time. But at 11:30pm last night the country's best forecasting brains were still predicting a few hours of sunshine first thing in the morning. So Ben and I set our alarms for 5:30 with a view to bagging some of the important shots before breakfast... and in gorgeous early morning sunshine.

Except...

We woke to a glowering overcast sky, the clouds almost groaning under the weight of impending downpours. Figuring it was at least still dry(ish), we saddled up, winched ourselves up the big hill on the other side of the valley and bagged a few shots anyway. I called time when the encroaching dampness meant I could no longer keep the front element of my lens spatter-free, and we retreated for breakfast and a re-think.

Early hopes that the weather system moving across the UK was simply faster-moving than expected have been shattered, too. Apparently it's due to rain for the rest of today's daylight hours, and there'll be a fair bit of it around tomorrow too.

All of which makes me wish I'd brought my crystal ball with me. At least it might give me a more optimistic forecast... even if it's wrong.

Tri something new

Over the years I've shot most things on two wheels, but it's been a while since I've turned my lens on the skinny-tyred forerunners of mountain bikes. All that's changed recently with commissions from new triathlon mag Tri Plus, who asked me if I wanted to shoot some bike tests for them. I jumped at the chance, because it's an opportunity to look at a familiar subject in a new way.

I shot most of the test (with the exception of some detail pics and a couple of individual bike shots) without flash on a bright, sunny day. Students of my photo courses will know all about my enthusiasm for accurate panning technique, and mine was certainly being put to the test. Flash can cover a multitude of sins including slightly misjudged panning - without it, I had nowhere to hide. 

Luckily my eye-hand coordination turned out to be better than my team sports skills would suggest. I came away with some openers like this:

Nikon D3, 80-200mm f/2.8, 1/30sec f/20 @ ISO200

The flowers added a splash of colour and a heightened sense of speed, but the success of a shot like this all hinges on whether at least one of the rider's heads (and preferably a good chunk of one of the bikes) is completely sharp. Here's an unsharpened, 100% crop of the second rider's head:

The sun must've really been shining on my luck that day, because through a fortuitous sequence of events I also ended up selling one of the images to the UK importers of Wilier frames for use in a series of ads:

Nikon D3, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1/320sec f/11, two radio slaves

Regular readers will know that I'm a stickler for retaining as many rights in commissioned images as possible - and this is a perfect example of why that's important. If I'd reliinquished my copyright to the commissioning client, I would never have been able to make this sale. The small print in contracts isn't the most exciting reading, but it's there for a reason...

XXtra effort

Media launches - of new product to the mountain bike press - are one of those eagerly anticipated perks of the job. It often means a trip somewhere warm and sunny, great riding, lots of high-end bikes to try out and plenty of free food and beer. What's not to like?

Of course, from the manufacturers' point of view it's all about ensuring their new widget gets the maximum possible exposure. You don't need to be a psychologist - or a conspiracy theorist - to understand the reason for all the wining and dining. And there's no denying it's fun to get together with a bunch of like-minded bike geeks and discuss the finer points of (say) DOT 5.0 over DOT 5.1 brake fluid. 

But from a photographic point of view, media launches aren't always the best places to be. For a start, everyone else is there. Looking at the same stuff, riding the same trails, using the same locations. The manufacturer doesn't care if everyone's images end up looking the same - for them, it's not about art, it's about product.

Nikon D300, 50mm f/1.8 w/+2 dioptre, 1/250sec f/6.3 @ ISO200, single radio slave w/softbox

But I do care. And so when I found myself in a corner of Tuscan loveliness recently, basking in 30 celsius sunshine as SRAM's product managers extolled the virtues of their new (and admittedly very impressive) XX groupset, I found myself preoccupied less with the niceties of chainlines and exit ramps and more with how to turn yet another press launch into a visually arresting 7 page feature.

There's a golden rule that I apply when I'm faced with having to get shots amongst a group of other photographers: watch what they're doing, and then do something different, preferably somewhere different. So, whilst everyone else was clustered around the SRAM truck shooting static closeups of XX components on various bikes, I was working out how to get a shot of the new kit in action.

Component shots that break the mould aren't easy. I didn't want an action shot of an XX-equipped bike being ridden, because it wasn't the bike that was the story. So, I figured, I'd have to break out the Magic Arm and get my camera in close and dirty. Here's the result as it appeared in What Mountain Bike, which I'm really rather pleased with:

Nikon D300, 10.5mm f/2.8, 1/15sec f/22 @ ISO200

What you can't see is the dozens (and dozens) of pics that didn't quite work. For a variety of reasons I wasn't able to find a smooth enough trail for my usual Magic Arm technique to work, so I had to improvise and, er, 'cheat'. If you look closely at the pic you might be able to figure out what I did.

The moral of the story, I think, is that it's worth going out of your way to try something different. There were more than a dozen photographers and journos at the XX launch, and no-one else came away with an image anything like this one despite having access to the same raw materials. If I can keep coming back with images that everyone else misses, it gives my clients a reason to keep coming back to me.

Better the devil you know?

Working as a photographer means making use of lots of arcane bits and pieces of skills or knowledge that often have little to do with photography. For example, when I get a call to do a shoot, one of the first things I need to sort out is location. 

A fast bit...

This is one of the joys and bugbears of shooting to spec - instead of recording something that's already happening, like an event, I spend most of my time fabricating the features I shoot. It gives a lot of flexibility, but puts a lot of the decision-making back in my hands. A double-edged sword if ever there was one.

I've got a mental list of locations - a kind of grey matter rolodex that's got a bit dog-eared over the years from constant flick-throughs. Rocky trails. Narrow trails. Trails with good corners. Trails with good views. Trails that aren't too far from the carpark. Trails with big drops. Trails to avoid because they're likely to be muddy / in the shade / hidden under 6 feet of bracken according to time of year / weather conditions. And so on.

... an open rocky bit...

It is, needless to say, a very incomplete list. One of the things I'd definitely like to have more time to do is just get out and ride. It's good for the soul and it'd update my location list. But, for now, I'm stuck with the one I've got. And actually, it's served me pretty well over the years.

... a concrete bit...

So I've got another shoot coming up in the next 10 days or so with various different requirements, and I've been flicking through the ol' rolodex again. And the location I keep coming back to is, in fact, one that I've come back to on countless occasions over the past six or seven years: Cwmcarn in south Wales. A nine mile ribbon of purpose-built singletrack (and a couple of miles of separate downhill track to boot), it's one of the most weather-resistant and versatile locations I know of.

... a peachy singletrack bit. And it's all in one corner of south Wales

It's got trees, rocks, roots, fast bits, gnadgery bits, open bits, views, lots of corners and plenty of airtime if that's what floats your boat. It's shootable year round, stands up to the Atlantic weather fronts rolling up the Severn estuary remarkably well, and has provided me with more feature, bike test and cover material than I care to remember. 

Can I eke another shoot out of it? Yeah, I reckon so.

Shoot of the year

It's not in the shops for another few days, but subscribers will already be receiving the first copies of What Mountain Bike's annual Bike of the Year issue - and I can't resist giving a sneak peak at some of the photos I've been sitting on for the past few weeks. Go on, go out and buy a copy - it's got lots of shiny bikes in it, one or two decent pics... and you'll have the satisfaction that comes from knowing that you're indirectly helping to pay my mortgage. What more could you ask for?

Nikon D3, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1/640sec f/5.6 @ ISO200

The Bike of the Year issue has always been a bit of a bumper round-up of the absolute best in mountain bikes and kit, put together by indisputably the most experienced test team in the business. But this year editor Matt Skinner pulled out all the stops, bumped a few of the suits' heads together and put into action a Master Plan of truly epic proportions - including a five-day shoot in the Lake District and a trip to California.

And yours truly got the call to shoot it. All of it.

Nikon D3, 80-200mm f/2.8, 1/320sec f/9 @ ISO200, two radio slaves

Nikon D3, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1/200sec f/13 @ ISO200, two radio slaves

To say I was chuffed would be an understatement. Forty-odd pages of editorial in a single issue is a pretty good showcase by any standards. It's also a fairly big responsibility, and there were a few wobbly moments (me to Matt, on hearing of his plan to fill 28 pages of the mag on a 5 day shoot in the Lakes in early April: 'er... are you sure you want to do that?'*). But I love a challenge - and this was certainly it.

Nikon D3, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1/400sec f/8 @ ISO200, two radio slaves

So I spent 11 days on location, 7 of them shooting. Drove 1500 miles. Flew around 10,000. Filled umpteen 2Gb cards with raw images, then spent nearly 3 days editing them down to a more manageable number before processing the resulting several hundred files to jpegs. Dropped one of my Pocket Wizards in a lake. Got sunburnt, twice. Stood in cold water for so long my feet hurt. Cursed the D3 sensor's magnetic attraction to dust, a lot. Praised its ability to turn in clean files in almost no light, several times. Rediscovered the joy of Duck Tape.

Nikon D3, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1/60sec f/4.5 @ ISO1600, single radio slave

Nikon D3, 14-24mm f/2.8, 1/250sec f/11 @ ISO200, two radio slaves

And, although the resulting swathe of pictures in the new issue inevitably has me focussing on the ones I coulda shoulda woulda shot better, I'm actually quite pleased with the results. All 43 pages of them. 

With such a wide-ranging brief I had to shoot a bit of everything - from epic landscapes and atmospheric riding pics, to portraits of slightly reluctant subjects and the biggest, most complicated location still-life of bikes I've ever undertaken. it's good to get out of my comfort zone every now and then - it pushes me to try new techniques and look at familiar problems in a new light. And it's usually in situations like these that I turn in my best pictures.

It's been a busy month. But a worthwhile one.

Nikon D300, 10.5mm f/2.8, 1/20sec f/22 @ ISO200

* Perhaps you have to be British to understand: the Lake District is to rain what Arizona is to the lack of it.

And on the third day...

Nikon D300, 85mm f/1.4, 1/8000sec f/1.4 @ ISO200

... I decided I could do a shoot in the morning and then drive from San Francisco to LA in the afternoon. Given that my first big US road trip was back in '87, when I took five days to drive from Newark, NJ to Dallas, TX, you'd have thunk I'd know better. I'd never consider doing a morning's work followed by a drive from London to Edinburgh, for example. But there you go. I blame maps of the US. It's such a big country, all the distances look tiny.

Big thanks today to satellite radio, Pacific Coast Highway loveliness, caffeine and Duck Tape.

No thanks to resurgent jetlag, porridge-stirring American transmissions or sight-seeing tourists who insist on driving everywhere at 45mph.