Island Cup Races 2015 Mid-Season HighlightsI've had the pleasure of taking pictures at many of the Island Cup races this season. Along with getting shots of some kick-ass action, it's been a great way to learn about nearby riding areas that I'd never been to, despite their proximity to my Comox Valley home base. Taking these pictures has also been a learning experience: the Cumberland Downhill race, for example, was an exercise in practicing how to get great shots of fast-moving riders under a dark canopy. Usually conditions like those in the Cumberland Forest lend themselves to blurry images due to having to leave the shutter open for a relatively long time, or noisy ones due to bumping ISO into the stratosphere. Luckily, though, I had recently acquired a set of Cactus RF60 speedlights and matching V6 Transceiver, and the Dodge City Downhill race was a great opportunity to put them to the test. (I had been using a set of Olympus FL-600R lights for over a year, but they were a bit under-powered for the conditions, and the trigger is optical and thus requires line-of-sight - not ideal when your light is over the rise or behind a tree.) Once I get more time with these lights I'll do a review. In each and every race I tried something different in an attempt to push my photographic boundaries a little bit. Sometimes those experiments worked (hooray for lights and radio triggers in the dark forest!), and sometimes not so much (I never managed to get an overhead shot at a Cumberland bridge that I was truly happy with) - but at least I'll have expanded my repertoire either way.
Of course, there was more than just the downhill race. I also managed to get myself to the Cumberland XC and the Nanaimo XC races. I was also physically at the Hammerfest Enduro, but just barely, due to injuries that left me hardly able to lift a camera.
Full galleries from each race are on my Events page: http://photos.lorenzjimenez.com/events So what's next? Well, the XC finals at Campbell River is just around the corner, and you bet I'll be there!
Keywords:
BC,
British Columbia,
Cumberland,
Errington,
Nanaimo,
Vancouver Island,
athletes,
athletics,
bikes,
mountain biking,
sports
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