Probably one of the most rewarding events for a photographer is, to see
his work printed and published in one way, shape or form. The shot below was
taken on the 17th of October 2010 when I spend a year in Kamloops,
BC, Canada. This article will tell the
story of the picture, from taking it until finally seeing it published on the
Race Face Atlas FR boxes, two years later.
Matt Brooks
of http://lonewolfproductions.ca and me shot a lot together in
Kamloops after he invited me to join a shooting when Lone Wolf Production was
just in the beginning of its successful journey. If you are interested in
finding out more, have a look here: http://www.pinkbike.com/news/lone-wolf-productions-florian-feise-slide-show-2011.html
Story of the jump
Kamloops
shredder Graham Agassiz went down super hard on the same location. I am still
blown away how gnarly that crash was and luckily he just walked away from it.
At that time the take-off was located a lot further back and more to the left
from the rider perspective. Which means that the jump was even bigger than it
is on the picture now. A while later, Matt and me were in the same area and
decided to rebuild the gap from a super gnarly one to a gnarly one. We put a lot of effort building the
2.0 version of it. The take-off was now closer to the landing and a more on the
right. Which meant that it was not that big of a hip jump. Nevertheless it was
still good size.
Huge
respect goes out to Matts speed judging skills! I spend nearly all my time
riding, building and shooting with Matt
for one year. I have never seen him misjudging the speed for something
new. He nailed the first attempt and landed everything perfectly. We were all fired up on shooting it soon.
Story of the shoot
One of the
coolest things about Kamloops are the insane sunsets and sunrises. The sky can turn
to fire within 3 minutes. Luckily we caught one of those sunsets on the 17th.
While Matt was warming up, taking in-runs and positioning Go-Pro cameras next
to the jump I was looking for angles to shoot.
Usually, I
walk around the area and simply try how things look through the camera or by
simply snapping a quick test picture, nothing wrong with that. Sometimes the
initially idea of the picture is the one that works best for me. However,
sometimes it is not. So I can only recommend to overcome the urge to make use
of the first idea and try more perspective. If you still want to use your very
first idea after that, you should.
For this
one I was very lucky. On the other side, there was another huge hill with
roughly the same size, which made it possible to shoot from the same elevation.
I tried a lot of angles with a landscape format, but I was never happy with it.
Portrait simply showed the sheer size of it way better. I tried to follow one
of the most important advises I have ever gotten in photography: Always involve
the foreground and background into the picture! I have quite a strong habit of
using some plants or branches to frame the rider and to build the foreground.
You can find that in the large majority of my mountain bike pictures. This one
is not an exception. I found a nice group of branches that were in the perfect
shape and position to frame the space in the picture that would otherwise be
boring. There was a lot of dust around the take-off, because of the test runs
Matt took earlier and that was perfect. All the dust clearly showed where he is
taking off.
After the 5th
shoot we had everything working together. Matt cracked a perfect table, the
light was perfect and I was happy with the perspective and we called it a day.
Technical data
The people
who know me, also know that I use very inexpensive cameras and lenses. This
picture was made with a Canon EOS
Digital Rebel XT (in Europe it’s called EOS 350D) and a Sigma 55-200 mm 4-5.6
lens. All in all, actually quite cheap equipment, the camera costs around 650
Euro and the lens about 150 Euro when it was new. That’s not a lot, compared to
the thousands you can spend on those products.
I used an f-stop of 7.1 and a
shutter speed of 1/250, which was a little bit slow when I look back on it. You
cannot really tell in a small resolution, but there is a very tiny blur on the
rider which could have been avoided. Furthermore, I used the f-stop automatic
to simply set the right f-stop and let the camera choose the right shutter
speed that might have been a little mistake.
All the editing, which was luckily not a lot, was done in GIMP on a slow
Acer netbook, which still causes me neck pain. I still don’t have Photoshop and
neither a fancy “photographer mac book”. I simply never felt the need to buy
expensive equipment, since it never restricted me.
I hope that
I could give you a little insight on how we got the picture and have fun
shooting!