Aint so bad…

The weather has been really bad the last few days so been watching a lot of movies…

This is for sure the best mountain biking movie I have ever seen…particularly the filming is soo impressive:

Been shooting lots of biking recently…yesterday I went up to what in winter is the Snow Park resort, but in the summer is just a dusty alpine desert with loads of routes down.

I was riding and shooting with the Freeride NZ team who take clients up there to ride the trails including the national downhill course, which is scary as hell…

Full shoot here

Girls Freeride NZ Clinic

My friend runs a girls mountain bike clinic and she asked me to shoot some promotional photos for them.

I still havent enticed Flo to give it a go after our last attempt…

Epic POV video

Freeride Girls promo shoot

WanakaFest is on…

Today it was the Urban Downhill Bike race.

The main section of the course was a very tight and fast line of 5 sketchy concrete kinked sets of stairs, ranging from 6 to 12 steps…

This guy, James Pollard, won it with a seriously fast slightly kamikaze style run clearing most of the sets…

Lake Wanaka is a bit of a small town bubble sometimes so we went to Lake Hawea for a change which is another huge lake covering 141 km² and is about 20 minutes away from Wanaka.

I find the textures on beaches amazingly hypnotic, (mainly cos I want to know how the hell the patterns formed like that?) to the point where I wasted long periods of time crawling around in the sand taking macro photos of different textures, with Flo getting very bored.

I then tried to wake her up by taking her biking in the woods. She is pretty accomplished on the roads after years of cycling in London, but her offroad skills still need a little bit of work…

I spent ages explaining how to lean back and ride around a banked corner and then got her to try. She got a little heavy on the front brake and nose wheelied out of the corner towards where I was waiting, at which point she tried to grab me to slow down. Instead of actually slowing down she closelined me around the neck, lifting me off my feet, and I went off the side of the trail backwards in to the woods with her and both bikes on top of me…

Other than me destroying yet another phone, we both survived with only a few cuts and bruises, so now we have a new challenge for the summer… Next time we will have padding, full face helmets and I will be standing much further back though.

No photos of the biking for obvious reasons, but here are lots of beach/texture photos to bore people with…