This year since I sold my Beta I have turned up at a few trials to take photographs for use on the RRND website and in the magazine. Some of you will have featured in a few of these, either looking brilliant, feet on pegs on a difficult climb etc or perhaps ignominiously jumping/falling off your bike or caught with a foot planted firmly on the ground.
As the bikes are on the move and faces usually in shade it is necessary to use the flash to get a good photo. Well it is with my limited skills although no doubt Don Morley could do better with a Brownie box camera! For those readers under 50 years old a Brownie was half the size of a shoe box with a lens the size of a pea. Anyway, I hope the flash is not too intrusive and that you'll be pleased if I manage to catch a good photo of you. If you do find your concentration is broken by the camera then by all means have a word and I'll not take any photographs of you.
Of course I miss the challenge of actually riding in trials but there is a certain satisfaction to be had when I manage to take an action photo which is in focus, at the correct exposure and the rider is close enough to be identifiable. If you are still waiting for such a photo of you doing something incredible with your bike against all the odds, or even just not falling off it, then you might not be too surprised to learn that many do not satisfy all these three criteria and are not saved!
Another challenge is to catch someone with their foot actually on the ground. Of course such occurrence are usually too fleeting to record due to the lag of the flash going off. (Digital cameras do have their drawbacks). Fortunately at the last evening trial Pete Jenkins was cooperative enough to put a foot down three times for dabs long enough for me to have made an oil painting. Here is one of him doing a left footer. I'll not include the others as it would misrepresent the riding skills he has managed to pick up from me over the years. The following photo of Rob Sherlock descending the same slope shows how Pete got it all so horribly wrong! He used his middle finger on the brake and not his nose picking finger!
Just to prove the photo of Pete was not a complete fluke, here is another of a rider in a much more precarious position, (no names to protect the innocent)! I'm please to say that to his credit he actually did make it safely over the top.
It is fun taking photos like these and if you can't get on a bike for one of our trials why not turn up with your camera instead. I'm sure David is always looking for super photos for the magazine.