A busy summer

This lead shot is probably my fave from the Denver Cruise series. It's nominally a capture of a rad moto cruiser, worked with my special secret lomo recipe... but that also happens to be my good fixte pal Frye there in the background, looking like an Abercrombie model.

Oh yes. Here we go again with my lame protestations of being busy. Honestly, though, the combination of my somewhat flakey bootlegnet wireless here at Chez LFR plus the dude considering it his Moral Imperative to keep me busy 24/7, has been seriously cutting into my internet time. On review, living alone pretty much sucked rocks compared to living with A and the Psychokitties (and the nine bikes... can't forget those guys either).

Perhaps if I post a bunch of photos that explain where I've been all summer, it will somewhat make up for the fact that I basically haven't had time to post.


This one's a shot of the Ogden Theatre marquee, with some awesome headliners up. I posted a ton more from this Denver Cruise on Roadbikereview awhile back, click to link.

Every other Saturday, I've been heading up to support Aaron and shoot pics at the Winter Park mountain bike series, which he's currently kicking major arse in.


That's a nice schwag shot from WP; Aaron picked this up on a cold rainy day a few weeks ago. His mom loved it.


This kid was just flat hauling in the slick, muddy conditions that day. Shooting fast motion in abysmal light, at roughly f/4 or so to maximise my shutter, whilst trying to keep the fill flash from startling the riders in the singletrack was a challenge. I had fun. I've also had quite a bit of interest in the shots I took, so I'm printing cut sheets and will take them to the next race, since there have been no photos posted on their web site for the series as yet.

Back in the '90s before he moved here from D.C., Aaron was both a sponsored rider and a professional mechanic for the Spooky factory team. Meaning he keeps his equipment (and mine) in peak working condition. The rain at this race was wreaking havoc with everyone's gear, so we heard plenty of squealing discs, creaking shocks and grinding drivetrains. The joke of the day was that Aaron keeps the Heckler so tight that it's just too damned quiet. We (meaning the marshals and me) couldn't even hear him coming, so all we got to see of "Rider #684!" was his Camelbak disappearing down the mountain. By the time I realised it was him, I'd completely missed the shot.


This one of him at the start, tho, really tells it like it is. Cold, damp and stressed out. Aaron's the rider on the far left, in the red-and-black kit.


Two weeks later, the sun was out, the course was much more open and rolling, and I had no such troubles capturing a good action shot of A in the singletrack this time. This one also shows I've figured out how to metre the fill correctly AND learned to use trap focus. O yeah!

Aaron has been hounding me to carry his big-ass fancy ballmount tripod to events. Meh. I'd rather shoot handheld and have the flexibility. I'm getting reasonably good at it. I also suspect that hucking a tripod along with all the other shite I carry at these races would be an exercise in How To Completely Own Myself. The singletrack I'm riding to get to these spots gets downright rocky, skinny and steep. It's already hard enough to sherpa 20 lbs of camera gear, bug spray, etc... up there in the Metropolis without the bonus option of clotheslining myself with a tripod.

When he hasn't been racing the Winter Park series, Aaron has been hauling me out to BFE Colorado to bag the biggest, sickest, most radical stashes of singletrack I've ever seen. Today we were out in the hinterlands somewhere north of Breckenridge for the second time in the past couple weeks. At the end of August, we're going to take a long weekend and head back out to Crested Butte for a four or five day epic.


This shot was from today, on the jeep road leading up to the Colorado trail. Oh. My. God!! This SOB totally redefines steep, ass-busting technical un-fun climbs. When I say the singletrack payoff is worth the pain in the rear (and the back, and the legs) getting up here, I mean it. The next 2 shots should somewhat prove it.




All this mountain biking (well A also drags me around on multihour road rides during the week...) is either going to kill me or make me fitter than I've ever been in my life. What I do know is that insane amounts of riding plus my refusal to drive to work for the past six months, or anywhere else for that matter, means I'm slimmer than I've been since high school.


Since it's been requested, I'm sticking a (somewhat) recent photo of me on the blog. Meh. Frye shot this one back in June at the Denver Cruise. I'm still toughing it out with the hair, tho at least now it's finally long enough to get put in a ponytail on rides.

Cheers,

LFR