HOW IT ALL STARTED
I first met Garty (John Gartside) in France. We were there for the French Polaris when Steve my racing partner and myself had the unexpected pleasure of sharing a gites with John and his racing partner Matt. Talk about boys being boys we partied harder than we rode.
I did not think anyone could have more gadgets than me but John takes the crown for having something to do everything, he even had a rechargeable battery bike tyre pump!
Soberish conversations with John about his motor biking and his filming of his jaunts passed hours, his latest thing was to video mountain biking with his head camera. Thanks to Matt we were able to see the results of Johns efforts on his laptop.
I was hooked I had to do it.
Johns crude remote set up seemed just too crude and seemed a faff. There had to be a better way, so the first thing I did when I got home was get stuck in to researching equipment. I thought it would be a doddle. |
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There were only a few sites that had head camera videos on them. Peter Falagans for one was very impressive but no one would reply to my emails requesting help in setting myself up. It took me weeks, video cameras, bullet cameras, Lanc controllers, batteries, mounts etc. Each time I thought I had it sorted there was always something not quite right. Eventually I produced a shopping list and without any guarantees of it all working I placed my orders. My research worked and it all works quite well as I hope you will see. The first outing was the Groovy Tribes Christmas ride in the Lakes. Hours of editing produced my first video that went down very well at the club AGM.
The Long Shadows, Lawson Park videos where taken from that first experiment. Unfortunately I broke my collarbone in a fall trying to catch the lads up which left me with a six-month gap in my riding. In that time the lads all got downhill bikes and by the time I was back in the saddle they were miles ahead of me, riding drop-offs, jumping doubles and haring down courses. My first down hill experience was in Morzine last year, which was like a baptism of fire. I survived a few crashes and am trying hard to hone my skills to get the type of footage I want to shoot.
Now there are four of us with helmet camera set ups, so the films are getting a tad more exciting.
LINKS
www.mac.com
www.rfconcepts.co.uk
www.sony.com
www.davehalton.co.uk |
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WHY I DO IT....
I have done some pretty scary stuff in my time, (check out my photo site) but down hill mountain biking has to be the ultimate stoke! At 45 my mum says I should grow up but I will never do that. I just want to show what fun this sport is and that you don't have to be a world class rider to enjoy the extreme down hills that we enjoy so much. This is an amateur site for amateur riders and budding film makers to see what our sport is all about..... Oh yeah and to remind the pros that everyone has to start somewhere
The cameras I use are a Sony DCR-TRV 22e - 33e and a Sony DCR-TRV60e with lanc control
The head cams are sony 21CWSHRX - low light version and the new Sony Super Exview HAD 520TVL
All my editing is done on an iMac in iMovie. I am trying to learn Final Cut but time seems short these days.
The site is created by myself via .mac, Apple Macintosh's personal web server
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