From a technical standpoint, I was using a Nikon D700, Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR2, AlienBee 1600 with a Vagabond Mini, and PocketWizard FlexTT5 MiniTT1, AC3 and AC9 components. I was able to pack all of this gear into a backpack and ride out to the course, which was essential since there was not close car access. There are two great things about these new PocketWizards. The first feature is that I’m able to capture very high shutter speeds while still using flash. Most of these shots are in the neighborhood of 1/1250 of a second, providing sharp, action stopping clarity. The second essential part of this setup, is that I have the ability to adjust the strobe power from the camera. The race was held under partly cloudy skies, and the sunlight was constantly changing from bright sun to shadow. It was extremely difficult to keep the exposures consistent, since every time the sun would change, I would have to make an adjustment. Fortunately, I was able to do it from the camera. I would have been able to take more consistent shots with constant ambient lighting conditions, but I’m certain that I will improve in my setting adjustments with practice. An unusual side effect of shooting over the sync speed, is that adjusting the shutter speed also affects your flash power. This made manual camera and flash power adjustments a bit more complicated than I’m used to.

As a final note, all this technology comes with another hefty price. I’ve been unable to get consistent firing with these units. It’s a real bummer when you’ve got one chance for the shot and the flash doesn’t go off. Insert unhappy face here. Nonetheless, the performance advantages and high power of this system keep me banging my head against the wall and keep trying to work out the bugs.

I’ve picked my top photos, based on lighting as well as importance of riders. This first photo is probably my top favorite, featuring this animal of a man called Jens Voigt. Simply a stunning photo and stunning expression. The sun was mostly behind the clouds which is giving him a soft rim light on his right arm and shoulder.

Next we have Colorado prodigy Danny Summerhill gritting his teeth and looking like he’s actually enjoying the pain.

I’ve never heard of Carlos Rodriguez, but I do like the feeling of this photo. Here the sun came out in full strength, so I cranked up the strobe to balance the sunlight, thereby giving the photo a bright commercial look.

I had to include this shot of Anders Lund since he’s being chased by some nutjob in a wig. Interesting blur on the left side from a spectator’s arm. I call that Art.

If this next shot was capture using merely natural light, we probably wouldn’t have been able to see the steely gaze of über-star Fränk Schleck from behind the visor of his time trial helmet.

I gotta give a shout out to Jeff Louder from Utah. The light in his eyes and the drool on his chin show that he’s deep in the pain cave on this ride. As the sun dipped behind the clouds but the flash power stayed high, the subject is illuminated strongly in front of an underexposed background.

Here’s the big shot of the big man Cadel Evans who was fresh off his first Tour de France win. Unfortunately Cadel rode on the far side of the road on the outside of the bend, which was farther away from the strobe than everyone else was riding. I guess when you are a superhero you don’t even have to take the shortest line.

In the above shot, do you see the yellow and green blob hovering about the team car? Yeah, well that is an Aussie cycling fan cheering on The Man!

Here we have the stage winner and eventual overall race winner Levi Leipheimer. This is where I have to shed a small tear, since I experienced a painful PocketWizard misfire. Decent shot, but to me it lacks the punch of some of the other shots without the auxiliary boost of light. I did very minimal retouching on these photos, but I did brighten Levi’s face in this shot since it was underexposed.

Things were getting crazy by the time Stage 2 winner, fan favorite, and penultimate rider George Hincapie hit the final stretch. I switched to a horizontal position to show more of the crowd jumping in front of me.

The final rider of the day was race leader and young American Tejay Van Garderen. Tejay put up a valiant fight but was denied the victory by the deep experience of veteran Levi Leipheimer. You’ll be hearing much more from Tejay in the decade to come. On a technical note, it’s pretty obvious where my strobe was placed!

Well I hope the photographers out there have enjoyed my technical details, and everyone else probably isn’t reading this and just looked at the pictures anyway. Another option with the PocketWizard Flex units, is that I could have shot using TTL flash metering. This may have made keeping up with the changing light a bit easier. But frankly, auto shooting scares me. Under normal portrait conditions I like to have complete control of my camera and flash so that I get exactly the results I’m looking for. However, if I get another chance to shoot in conditions like this, I just might see how these units are able to auto expose the riders.

There is a new biking game in the town of Boulder, and it’s called Valmont Bike Park. This is a public park where riders of all ages and abilities can come out and play and work on their skills. I’m an old school BMX kid from the 80′s, and I’ve loved jumping bicycles ever since I got my first BMX bike way too many decades ago. At first sight, the big kid jumps at the park are pretty intimidating. But the allure of flying though the air and acting and feeling like a 14 year old again are too much for me to resist. So I bought a dirt jump bike and have been hitting the park. I have a few friends with similar BMX backgrounds from the Dark Ages, and together it makes a pretty nice afternoon to head out to the jumps for some air time.

Bobbie Turner of 5280 Fotos is my main accomplice and a photographer as well. This past Sunday we headed out to the park for our first photo session. I brought my usual high powered strobe setup and parked it on the first wood jump on the XL dirt jump line. I really like the strobed look, so we setup shots at one jump and one jump only for this session. Thanks Bobbie for tripping the shutter on the photos in the second half of this set. I was using a PocketWizard Mini/Flex triggers, which allowed me to sync at 1/1000 of a second to freeze the action.

First up, a random rider with a nice flat tabletop. This is I move I really want to work on.

I love the edgy lighting in this shot. Generally I like cross/rim light, but it’s tricky at this spot to not have the strobes in the background.

Eli is up, looking cool sailing over the iconic Flatirons of Boulder.

Lots of sun flare when using the 14-24 lens. Without any clouds in the sky I like using the sun as a compositional element.

This is a cool shot showing the strobe setup and an overall view of the jump.

Making ridiculous faces is a great way to get featured on the blog.

Here’s a shot of me captured by Bobbie. I call this look Blue Aluminum. (Zoolander reference)

I’m loving the composition of this one.

Fun shot of a young BMX kid launching into the stratosphere.

We used to call this a “helicopter” back in the day.

Eli in yo face!

Lastly we have my current Facebook profile pic.

You can check out a full gallery of Valmont Bike Park photos on my Facebook Page. This is surely the first session in what is going to certainly be an ongoing evolution. At some point we’ll set up a shoot with some real pros pulling off amazing acrobatic moves. But in the meantime, there’s a group of old farts having a ton of fun acting like kids.

On our first day, I immediately noticed these rustic buildings, that are located right on Main Street. Using an AlienBee 1600 and a bare reflector, I lit Jayme and the front building. I positioned a second AlienBee 400 to light the second building in the background.

My least used lens is the Nikon 85mm f/2.8 PC. This is the older PC version, and not the newer PC-E, which means that you have to auto adjust the aperture ring. I usually don’t go for the extreme tilt shift blur effect … but today I’m liking it.

On our second day in Breckenridge, we went for a classic road bike ride over Loveland Pass. Upon our return to town we grabbed an incredible lunch at Amazing Grace cafe, followed by another little portrait session in the lot next door. I was working with balancing the strong backlit trees with some hard front light from a bare reflector. I take full responsibility for the um, “styling”, of Jayme’s hair!

You know life is good when your daily job assignment is to hit the Boulder trails with a cute dog and an even cuter girl for a photo shoot. Even after pinching myself, I still found that I’d been contracted to shoot the cover for Colorado outdoor sports and lifestyle magazine Elevation Outdoors. EO is an inspiring Boulder-based production that tunes readers like myself into local adventure, trends, gear, and general mountain shenanigans, so it was my pleasure to create an image for their June backpacking issue.

The assignment seemed simple enough, capture a cover photo that evoked the image of a blond woman backpacking with her dog mid-summer in the Colorado outdoors. The assignment became less than simple when I was handed a couple weeks of rain and snowfall in mid-May. These images were captured below the snow line in the foothills of South Boulder during a four-hour sunny interlude from thundershowers, yet still managed to include gale force winds. Fortunately, both the human (Jayme) and canine (Jax) models didn’t seem to mind, so I anchored my light stand with a 25-pound rock and kept shooting. Using a strobe is the key to illuminating your subject while maintaining those quintessential deep blue Colorado skies and wind-swept clouds.

Other than the selected cover shot, I thought I’d post some other fun images from the session. Enjoy!

River and I took a little drive out of town to the micro-town of Ophir. I was quite excited to find some trashed out buildings to play in. The first building with the wildflowers growing in it is SO COOL!

I didn’t really take any tourist pics in Telluride. This is it. I tilted it to make sure it wasn’t too boring. Well, maybe it’s boring to you. To me its awesomesauce the way you can see all the way down the end of the street. Maybe I’ll get bored of this effect someday. Today is not that day.

At La Cocina De Luz you can eat your Mexican food in the safety of an old bank vault. How about that door?!

Aw. A sunset. Isn’t that special? Well, it was pretty schweet.  I took these photos from the deck of a shirtless tattooed dude. He offered us snow peas that were growing on the deck along with a lot of tomatoes. He showed us the shelves where he started them in March. He says that he has a computer full of sunset photos from that deck. It didn’t make me feel all that special. Apparently the supermarket has a compressor that changes speeds and makes it really hard to sleep there. But the sunsets are mega fabulous.

Chapter 1 – Sunrise Landscapes

Chapter 2 – Afternoon Planning

Chapter 3 – Dune Camping & Night Shots

Having checked out the appetizers, let’s dive into the main course; this is the one blog to rule them all; where we strap on the snowboard and find out what sandboarding is all about!

I awoke in the early pre-dawn light lying in a pile of sand.  We had camped the night out in the open dune field. I was a little chilly, and there was a slight breeze.  It was hard to tell exactly how long it would be until the sun came up, but I knew we had to get moving in order to catch the perfect light.

The plan was to descend Star Dune at first light.  While hiking, we quickly realized that we weren’t going to get to the top quite in time.  There is only a narrow window of time where the sun grated across the sand to reveal the immaculate textures of the sand.  So I pulled out my camera and started shooting some landscape shots where we happened to be.

Silky sexy smooth sand shapes show sunken shadows.

OK, enough goofing around with landscape photos. We still had some serious business to attend to. It was time for a sunrise descent of Star Dune, perfect light be damned.  By the way, Star Dune is the highest dune in North America, rising 750 feet above the valley floor. BTW, whenever possible, I like to have girls carry my gear for me.

Here we have Melissa gearing up for some serious sandboard shooting. Side note, when asked to put sunscreen on my back, she didn’t whine nearly as much as Carl did when I was in Mexico last December. True story.

Nearing the summit of Star Dune, I encountered more windswept textured sand, and a great view of the Sangre de Cristo Range.  Star Dune didn’t actually turn out to be the best spot for sand boarding, as it wasn’t the steepest slope.  Some of the best slopes were smaller, and had a steeper angle and a harder surface which allowed for more speed.

At this point in the journey, I had to relinquish my shooting duties and strap on the snowboard for some warm weather sand boarding.  Melissa has posted some of her sand boarding shots on the Melissa Welsh Photography Blog. Part of our team effort on the adventure involved sharing camera gear, photo ideas, and blog fodder.  With her permission, I’ve selected and edited a few photos that she took but did not publish on her blog to accompany my version of our sandboarding adventure.

Riding a snowboard down sand dunes is one of those things that sounds like more fun in theory than it really is in practice! First off, I was using a snowboard, which isn’t really designed for sand. This does not lend itself to high speeds.  So in order to ride the dunes with a snowboard, you have to find the steepest slopes you can find just to be able to go fast enough to make any turns.  The second part, is that when you turn, you really just sortof push sand down the hill. So you can’t really traverse too much.  However, when you get a good slope, you can build up some speed, then make 3 or 4 good turns before you hit the bottom.  Oh, then comes the hike back up!  At 8700 ft above sea level, there isn’t a ton of oxygen to assist you in the battle against sand and gravity.  While some parts of the dunes are easy to walk on, getting back up from the steep slopes usually involves getting back up some loose and steep pitches, where you take a step up then slide half a step down. Just think of excruciating post-holing and you get the idea.

While it’s not going to replace snow sliding any time soon, it’s still pretty addicting. I would get just enough of a run to experience the groove, but not enough to really satisfy my need for carving. So after every run I just kept wanting to go back for more and more!

Here I am contemplating High Dune, which is the second highest dune in the park.  Oh, and by the way, I don’t think that I’m ever going to get the sand out of my snowboard boots.

I had this idea for a really cool angle on a shot, where I come sweeping across the front of the camera, shooting up a rooster tail of sand.  Well, as I said, the sand doesn’t really perform like snow, and traversing was a real challenge.  We tried to get the shot over and over, and every time I had to climb back out while baking in the sun.  Finally the heat and exertion started to get to me, I caught a backside edge, and I suffered my only crash of the trip. Fortunately, Mel caught the whole thing for your entertainment.

But finally, we got a shot that was somewhat close to what I was thinking! Mel also posted this one in her set . . . but I had to include it here too, it’s the money shot!  Want more action and arty sandboarding dune shots? Go here!

Well that’s the end of my first sandboarding adventure. While we were there, I saw some people with boards that were designed to be ridden on sand. It sure would have made the adventure a lot easier if I had a lighter board with bindings that worked with regular boots or sneakers.  I’ve since found out that there are actual sandboards. There is even a Sandboarding World Championship! Who knew? I didn’t, until I checked Wikipedia!

Overall it was a great first dune experience. It’s a pretty cool adventure to head to the beach, strap on the board, get a great workout, all while working on your tan. I’m definitely looking forward to heading back sometime with someone else who has a board so that I can both ride the dunes and shoot some action shots. Maybe I’ll even get a real sandboard. Who’s in?

We got up on the dunes a little bit late that day.  So it was good to do some test runs and find out which dunes had the best runs.  But we knew that the real money shots would come the next morning, when we would set out in the dark to be at the top at sunrise.

We spent the afternoon hanging out in a coffee shop in Crestone, staying out of the sun and refueling with coffee and sandwiches.  On the drive back from Crestone to the Great Sand Dunes National Park, we spotted a cool old building, and did an impromptu shoot that I posted earlier.

On the way back into the park, the light was just starting to lower. We decided that the best way to be at the dunes at sunrise was going to be to camp out on the dunes…

This was the third trail building day out of the year out at Betasso. There are many more days required before the trail will be open for riding. So do your part and gather your friends and come out for the next work days. As a bonus, there will be food and beverages and beers to be had at the end of the day. Check out BMA’s website for the latest schedule and calendar of events.

So I’m going to kick things off with one of those nostalgia inducing images. You know that you are experiencing the freedom of summer and killing time on the open road when you’re hangin’ your feet out the window. I wonder how many people have had their feet stung by bees while doing this?