Winternationals 2012

Sorry it's taken so long to upload these, but these are all from the Fuchs Lubricants Winternationals 2012. I only stayed for qualifying and only had my17-40mm lens with me, So this year I focused on lurking through the pits. I did manage to get my face right in the nitro fumes down in the top fuel pits. God damn that filthy yellow stuff clears the nasal passages better than snorting wasabi.

Above: I found this and thought it might be of interest.
Below: Just some of the parts that come out of a Top Fuel engine when things don't go right. Left is bent and burned valves, centre is mutilated connecting rod caps and right is melted bore sleeves.

Above: Right after a test fire up. The great part about being in the pits is that you can get almost as close as you like to these monsters, unlike many other motorsports.

the two above and one below: Off track entertainment is awesome.

 Above: In the the years of spectating Drag Racing, I have never seen the track cleaning tractors race during downtime.
Below: this one might be pretty grainy, using a 17-40mm with limited light is not ideal, but this was an amazing run by Andrew Cowin.

Below: I caught these guys at 1am finally test firing after a massive rebuild effort to make it for race day. If you camp nearby the track, you often get the #$% scared out of you in the middle of the night when one of these fire up and stabs the throttle. But that's ok, because it sounds so good.

Below: Testing the clutch, reverser and warming the diff gears.

 Above and below: Let's not forget the bikes. Below is a Top Fuel Motorcycle. These also run on nitromethane, and also hit well over 200mph in under 7 seconds. The people who ride these must be insane.

Again, sorry about being 2 months late on these, but I hope you enjoy them.

Riding photos #6: Goodbye Shailer Park!

Today's riding focus was to go ride Shailer Park skatepark, a fairly old skatepark that I'm told is soon to be demolished to make way for a set of shops. It's pretty sad, since this skatepark has been featured in an absolute ton of riding videos, including videos for the Brisbane based BMX parts company Tempered Bikes. Despite it's age it's bursting with very fun lines and is great for riders of all skill level. Riders for this set are a mate of mine who is just learning BMX, Alex Johnson, and sponsored rider Christian Dilizio.

I absolutely love the photo above. Today was the first time I've used a CPL filter, and I see why people use them. I hardly touched this photo in post processing at all. Rider above is Christian, with a decent x-up to get a bit warm and loose.

In about 3 or 4 riding sessions, Alex has really started to pick up why I've been riding so many years. He is more of a gamer, but since he's picked up a bike it seems as though he gets in to it as much as a damn good battlefield session.

Above, nac-nac. The weird name comes from it being basically the reverse of a can-can, where you kick one leg over the frame in front of your other leg as if you were dancing the can-can. Doing a nac-nac, you kick the leg behind your other leg above the tyre.

Above, Christian transferring bowl to bowl. A prime example of why this skatepark will be missed, one bowl features steel coping and a sub box, while the other is coping-less and a little more mellow for beginners. When we got to the skatepark, Alex started out riding around the coping-less bowl and did a few jumps out of it before moving on the the "better" bowl. Both bowls are open ended and you can transfer from each one into another bowl or section which creates some awesome lines. I even backfipped the coping bowl right before we left, and out of the handful of backflips out of concrete ramps I have done, it was by far the smoothest.

Above is Alex getting a little more psyched and jumping out of the corner pocket of the coping bowl. Between runs, Christian and I muttered a joke that we thought he was getting hooked on bikes like us, next minute he called out across the park "MAN! THIS IS ADDICTIVE!". Hunch confirmed? That pocket is the very same I launched a flip out of too, this place was definitely built for everyone.

After a brief stop off at Mt. Cotton skatepark and KFC, we went back to our home park of Victoria Point. It's a small skatepark with pretty mellow banks and quarters, but it's close to where we all live so it ends up being a regular weeknight riding spot. Apparently our local council has agreed to a petition to upgrade the park, but they're pretty slack when it comes to improving anything other than shopping centres or housing estates to be honest.

It was an awesome day with good mates, and everyone making  bit of progress. I feel pretty sad that Shailer park may be gone soon, but I am glad I got to ride it one more time and get the things I wanted to learn there done. Being around Alex while he took it to the wall and learned more was probably what pushed me to want to bring out the flips again. Backflips are incredibly fun, and there is no other rush like it in BMX (or anything else!), but the obvious dangers and intensity of them makes me hold back a lot, not to mention that right up until the point of already being commited to the flip, I'm always fighting a tough mind game. But that's just another thing I love about BMX, fighting to overcome what holds you back, and being rewarded for it. Enjoy!

Riding Photos #5: Thornlands fisheye set

Been meaning to upload these for a while, but work and my Cert III course has really been eating up all of my time lately, and, when I actually do get free time it's usually spent catching up on some riding time. I recently learned frontflips as well so usually there's a lot of resting time after I go out riding now (you gotta crash a lot to learn them, and crashing hard takes it out of you even if you walk away uninjured).

So, here's the rest of the batch from the 2 days of riding Nick Barnier and I did at Thornlands skatepark.

Nice tailwhip

Such a great day for a ride

Black Weapons

These last two shots were our focus for the day. Nick wanted a few shots of riding this hip, and some of an invert over it (one on the right). I framed it with the the edge of the tree at the top and the hip itself at the bottom, and had to use a bit of magic in post processing to cut the brightness of the sun.

This hip is one of my favourite spots to ride and appears in many riding photos in Australia. There's plenty of shots of young Alex Hiam blasting ridiculous stunts over it, among others. The reason being, this skatepark is fairly photogenic to riders, and the hip is a really nice shape to get a lot of height but it doesn't kick you hard enough to disrupt your balance. I typically have troubles trying to bring it up short when transferring in to the short side, there's not much room to land in but it's way too easy to boost too high.

Anyway, all of these shots were with a Canon 1000D with the 18-55mm f3.5-5.3 lens with a $30 eBay fisheye filter. That lens setup is worth no more than $130, and the distortion is pretty terrible but it's fun to experiment with, and I'm not a professional looking for super brilliant photos. I'm just a dude with a camera that likes to play around with angles and settings for fun. Maybe one day I will invest a lot of money in to my camera gear, but not while I'm still enjoying this setup.

Good bike, Good riding.

Rider: Nick Barnier. This photo has a little back story to it, which I'm sure many riders can relate to a little bit. I certainly can. A couple of days ago, Nick snapped a set of handlebars (you read that right, snapped them...) and in the down time spent some time and money on his bike and footwear. I met him this morning as he was fitting the new bars and I put on a new chain using the left over links from his and Chris' chain (apparently, KMC gives you enough links to make a chain and a half, 3 for the price of 2 anyone?). The result of the work is that he now has a perfectly smooth bike and nice fresh kicks to stick to the pedals. What does that have to do with this photo? well, a smooth bike always makes you go that little bit harder, because it feels great and really makes you more connected with the bike. This photo is a prime example of that rule, a huge boost over Thornlands hip isn't easy with the limited landing space, but damn it looks good!

Face to face

Bearded Dragons are cool. I know they're pretty common, but they make such great subjects because they sit still and look right at the camera lens no matter where you move, unless you preoccupy them with food. I spotted this on on  walk this morning when I went to collect some fresh plants and tadpole snails for my fish tank.

Both pictures were taken with my 18-55mm lens @55mm focal length, f5.6 and ISO 100. I wanted to use my 17-40mm but there was no way I'd be able to get close enough to the tree in the first place. Still, I'm pretty happy with these 2 photos since my 18-55 is just a kit lens.

Enjoy!

Backyard Warfare #2

These Max Force blasters are not only heaps of fun and great for defense against zombie attacks, but their colour schemes suit well with de-saturated backdrops. Like the last Max force blaster, I spent some time screwing around with different photos. I might do a night time long exposure shot again but I'll have to wait until I get a night off work.

Gecko!

Caught this sneaky ninja hunting down a moth just now. While geckos are great at keeping bugs at bay, they tend to fall off of whatever they're climbing and scare the hell out of you. They're totally harmless of course, but I scooped up this little fella and took him outside to go hunting elsewhere so I could work in peace.

They do also make this really loud chirping noise to communicate with each other at night. It's pretty common to see 5 or 10 ganging up on one massive moth. poor bugs don't stand a chance around here...

Anyway, nothing too exciting. Just a gecko. I like geckos though, just not convenient when I'm trying to get some stuff done.

More random wildlife

Another day on Coochie-Mudlo island, a few more photos with words to go with them. What should I find first? The same pair of curlews as last time I went over, but with a new baby. The parents were nesting in some scrub, and they aren't worried by people much anymore (probably because Dad always leaves out food for them in the afternoon...) so I managed to get this close to them, but the younger baby Curlew was too frightened to let me get close enough so I left it alone.

Magpies are fun to watch. In suburbia, they screw around by swing off your clothes on the clothes line or teasing cats behind windows. Pretty smart birds really. They're extremely common, but I thought this would make a decent photo. When I first got my camera, I learned to use it by using old lenses adapted to my camera body and taking photos of magpies in a field that was near me.

This Bearded Dragon also lives in the same area as the Curlew family, and spends most of it's time hanging off this tree. It's a bit bigger than the last random reptile I took a photo of, but definitely not very aggressive.

Australia is awesome.

Exploring: Eprapah Creek

I moved house last week to an estate that backs on to Eprapah Creek, and over the last few days I have been doing a bit of exploring for a couple of reasons, one is to collect some food for my fish and some native water plants for the tank, and the other is because I just plain love exploring random bushland. You can find all sorts of random things pretty easily, especially if you know what wallaby trails look like. They tend to cut through the bush finding places to get water and also to rest, so it makes sense to just follow where they go and eventually you'll end up at a nice spot to rest. But it's not all easy going, sometimes you have to do a bit of this:

After a few more dodgy log walks across much larger spans of water, and a bit of being a ninja across some rocks I found this little fella:

And then I followed another wallaby track to my final spot, a section of faster moving water in Eprapah Creek. I did set out with the intention of finding a spot like this, since I'd never tried long exposure photos of moving water before.

Both photos I had settings of f22, ISO 100 and a 5 second shutter speed. I also set a timer of 2 seconds, because the tripod had a little shake in it when I pressed the shutter button.

This spot was actually a thriving little ecosystem, I picked up a couple of plants for my aquarium and some native snails too. There were quite a few native rainbow fish feeding on mosquito larvae and tons of fry feeding on algae. It is actually legal to take rainbow fish from the wild to keep, but I decided to wait until the fry are a bit older so that I don't impact the breeding cycle.

Last one, is a HDR. I'm really shocking at doing these since I hardly ever do them, but I thought I might include this one since it turned out alright:

Giving the bike some love.

The other day while out riding to do the last bunch of photos, I noticed a few things on my bike that needed addressing. After you ride the same bike for so long you can feel when something is not quite right, like a faint vibration through the pedals or perhaps a bit of stiffness somewhere. Some people think I'm either psychic or just mental when I pick these things, but it just comes with a lot of riding and building a lot of bikes.

So, I decided to do a strip and rebuild to find these little issues. Sure enough, I had a headset bearing that was getting a little rough, a pair of crank bearings that will need replacing soon, and a stiff link in the chain. I also serviced my hubs, painted them and laced them to a different set of rims. I re-painted the frame in satin black as well. So here it is:

After almost 3 years of solid abuse, this frame is still going very strong. When I designed it, I intended for it to last 18 months to 2 years, and chose to have it built from Supertherm tubing. FBM did a great job of turning the dream into a reality. I am now expecting this frame to exceed the 5 year mark, which is almost unheard of within the BMX industry. Cheers to the only bicycle so far that can handle being put through hell and back!

Riding photos #4: Nick Barnier

Finally got the chance to head out riding again yesterday, unfortunately I'm now totally wrecked. It's the middle of summer here and the sun was an absolute killer yesterday. Australia sucks in summer. It may as well be the surface of Mercury. Even with sunscreen I started to burn within 10 minutes of being at the skatepark so I tried to become a shade dweller. Well, that still failed anyway and I'm now sunburned senseless and a bit dehydrated too.

While the riding was pretty limited, we still got the job done. Nick wanted to learn to do truckdrivers yesterday, which is a 360 barspin. It's definitely not a simple trick, there is a lot involved in a short space of time and requires fast thinking and heavy concentration. I can't even barspin to save my own life so needless to say I was stoked when he landed it. First stop of the day was Thornlands skatepark.

360 Barspin, trick of the day.

Decent Barspin.

Next stop after Thornlands skatepark was an undercover street spot to try and get a break from the sun. It's just a spot with some square benches but the metal edging makes them ideal for grinding without causing damage. For some reason, the council never put grind stoppers on these and never complain when we ride them, I think partly due to the fact that people respect the spot and take their rubbish with them and never cause trouble while there. I got a couple of shots from this bench, just trying different angles, and this 180 to fakie from the bench seemed to work best.

Last stop of the day was Cleveland skatepark. The quarter pipes here are quite wide so it's easy to pick a spot to sit and let people ride around you while you shoot photos. Though, it was still freakin' hot so it was just a mellow session of basic stuff. The result is this photo of Nick locked in to real nice footjam. I like taking photos of footjams for some reason.

That pretty much ended our day, the heat and sunburn was just way too much to keep going. Thanks to Nick Barnier for shreddin' like a boss even in the ridiculous heat. Possibly some more riding photos next week, depending on the weather and work.