This Is Dan, shot on a cold winter evening back in 2006. Dan lives/lived in Mugge and owned a bike shop. he moved up there just before this park was built in his original hometown of Shoalhaven heads so he would come back down to the coast during school holidays to ride. This was my first venture into off camera flash… I think I was using a sync cord and holding the flash with my left hand.

A muggy afternoon in November 2006 just before the skies opened up. I used to finish work at 2:30pm,  most afternoons I’d go home and grab my bike then pick Todd up from school and we’d go riding. I’d just started using one off camera flash with the dodgy at best pre-flash system, it had it’s limitations but for the most part it worked pretty well.

July 2007, I’d started using multiple off camera flashes and pocket wizards… as far as shooting went this was one of my biggest steps forward in terms of shooting ‘quality’ images…. not that you need to use a bunch of flashes to take good photos. I’ve always liked this shot, the lighting is perfect, they sky has a really nice gradient and I like how I cut half the rider off… it’s just a little bit different.

Back between 2006 and 2008 I would road trip up to Qld 2 or 3 times a year to hang out and ride. This was taken in October 2007. I met up with Chris Courtney and his mate Matt Whyatt for a ride and we ended up shooting a bunch of photos. I think a shot of Matt doing a look back from this angel ran in an issue of FP? This shot of Chris doing a flair was one that never seen the light of day. It’s crazy to see how far these guys have come since then.

This is Mitch, shot early in 2008 (I think this ran in an issue of FP) he had just painted his bike and wanted to get some photos with it before it got all scratched up… I think this was just before his first knee operation as well. I underexposed this a lot because I was shooting directly into the sun, using 2 flashes stacked up on full power to balanced the light back out.

Dawso is a legend, he’s only a year older than me but was already killing it when I started riding. This photo was shot late in 2008 and a bit of a change from my usual style at the time. I started working with the natural light instead of fighting it by trying to over power it with flashes. This was around the time I really started to take notice of natural light and using it to it’s full potential.

July 2010, I’d upgraded cameras to a D3s and I’d started shooting landscape photos a bit more, I actually found this spot while searching Google earth for some locations. It was a long drive on a really shitty dirt track to get here and once we climbed down the dam it was pretty obvious it was going to be tricky to ride. The run-up is really short, there are big concrete blocks all over the flat sections and the whole thing was covered in a thin layer of slime. I said I wanted to shoot a table on the vert wall, Jake didn’t even think twice, he put in 2 cranks and here we are. I was blown away at how easily he got it done. On a side note… we went back again a few months later to shoot some more photos. As we started setting up water began running over the top of the dam, it was a bit unsettling so we got out of there quickly!

This is an abandoned brickworks, This is Jake again and we shot this one month after the dam shot above. I’d been to this spot once before… I can’t remember why but I knew I had to come back and shoot photos here. Luckily I know the guy who owns it so he let us in, we had free reign of the place for the morning so we set to work setting up the pallet jump, hooking all the lights up… we even threw a bunch of news paper on the ground and ran caution tape around. I was so happy with how this shot came out because it was one of the first times I’ve had an idea in my head and it’s actually come out the way I imagined it.

This was a deliberate attempt to try something different. I’d been thrying to broaden my photographic horizons and this shot was influenced by fashion photography of all things.

It’s all natural light, and it’s really overexposed compared to my ‘normal’ shots. The blue tint is due to dropping the white balance right back and the haziness is from all the dust in the air.

What can I say about this guy… He is legitimately THE nicest guy you’ll probably ever meet, not to mention incredibly laid back and talented beyond belief on his bike. Simon lives about 15 mins away from me and we’ve ended up shooting a heap of photos over the years. This is at the old brickworks again, there was a shed there that now had a photographic studio in it that a guy had setup. Before Simon got there I was setting up my flashes and testing them… the guy from the studio came out with a confused look on his face wondering why all his studo strobes were going off all of a sudden…. turns out we were on the same pocketwizard channel haha (only photographers will understand the funny side of that)

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