Over three nights, my self and several riders travelled around North Wales capturing the action. Kicking it off with Antur Stiniog, where we ran into our first challenge, the weather! Antur is known for its wild weather patterns and in the middle of December you can’t expect lovely clear nights, more the total opposite.

Pulling up to Antur, it was already dark, we knew we were in for a wild night. Standing on the tops of the trails, you just felt disorientated, wind blowing you in your face, not knowing where it’s coming from, bright lights shining everywhere. Just trying to get kit out and set up flashes was tricky enough, let alone having Joe Thorburn and Emyr Davies ride their bikes!

We pressed on either way by starting the shoot off on a hip jump, naturally the best option in the windy conditions. By setting my camera to a long exposure of around 30 seconds I was able to capture the light trail that was cast by the helmet mounted light. We used the Exposure Equinox on top of the lids, surprisingly light and pack a fair punch with its all internal battery design. Then also during the long exposure I triggered the flashes at the peak of the jump to freeze the action onto the exposure. We used this technique for all the photos in the project, experimenting on a range of action, corners, jumps and fast sections to see what would yield the best results. It really was a game of trail and error.

We took the rain for as long as we could, but the weather got the better of us. Soaked through after a good few hours in the dark we retired and called an end with a wrap-up pizza at the local chippy.

Shooting done and back to the edit suits. Editing a set of photos like this can be tricky as there is a real balance of doing enough and processing them way too much. It’s key to nail the White Balance on a set like this, as the colour of the light can throw out any Auto WB system and make the overall shot far too blue, flip side, it’s easy to over compensate the colour of the light and you end up with a orange/yellow tint to everything. Using the flashes to light up the scene gave me a good indication of the WB and general exposure of the image so I edited around that, exaggerating the brightness of the lights but not blowing up the darks to ruin that night time feel.

Overall I feel the whole project came together really well, a great team of riders that put their necks out when it came to fairing the weather and top effort from Dan with the BTS photos. Get your self out on a set of lights (Exposure of course!) and hit the trails.