Enochdhu

I have been shooting downhill for many years now and I am very confident that the riders in these shots would have no awareness of flash being used. I know how to shoot flash so as not to disturb riders and this is why : the flash units are always placed behind or below the rider and angled so that the light cannot reach the eyes; the flash is used only for fill-in so is about one stop below the level of ambient light and the flash is not being used in any situation where the ambient light levels are so low that the riders' pupils will be widely dilated; I use two mono blocs with wide surface area reflectors and diffusers to create a large patch of light rather than a point source - if you looked directly in to these units as they fired it would be bright but nothing like looking into the flash of a small compact camera which produces an intense pinpoint of light; lastly I use high speed sync which produces a continuous even output light throughout the exposure as opposed to X-Sync or Hi-Sync that produce very large pulsed output. The fact that some photographers use their flashguns without regard to riders should not mean that all flash photography is automatically bad.

Thank you! You have summarised my shooting style to perfection. I consider my shots really as portraits of adrenalin junkies and I do my best to capture their insane commitment to winning. I also like to see the rocks flying and the tyres and forks compressing!

You're in deep, deep trouble monsieur cloverleaf! Remember I know where you live. I was quite enjoying the thought of someone thinking I was twenty years old. Why spoil their illusion? I can't even remember being twenty years old but I guess I must have been once.

These are actually out-takes. I was shooting with a Canon accessory filter called the Hubble 2B which normally produces dreamy out of focus images, but something obviously went wrong ...