Keegan up close at the kitchen table.

Watching the new 2010 course unfold over at BCBR.com is reminding me how much fun it was to race this years BCBR.

They have a review of this year's course via photos if you want to go to their site, I noticed my stylin' form dropping in to a steep descent at the 12:19 mark. I remember exactly where that was on the course, Dave was just behind me and for the next 30 seconds the descent just got steeper and steeper until it became a full wheel lock-up controlled surf-slide. Outrageous good times. I'm gonna embed it here.



Pretty small box right? For better quality and bigger images I suggest you watch it in High-def over at this link right here.

So this is what they have going for the new course video's at this point...

Day 0 - Team Prologue




Day 1



Day 2



BCBR's site doesn't have Day 3 video up yet as it's a new course route so it's on to Day 4 and 5...



Day 6 and 7 look like they are similar to last year's event I'll put the 2010 course vid's up when they hit BCBR's site.

Stoked.

We drove out to the Canmore Nordic Center this morning. Doreen was meeting up with Shelly so they could do some laps and the boys were going to be on XC ski's for their first time. They both did great, particularly since we didn't give them any poles to lean on.

As I was watching them fall over and struggle back up I got to wondering if either of them would ever compete at XC or biathlon. And as I daydreamed away I started thinking back to when I was a kid on skis and how I would have done if I had competed at XC or biathlon.

The first time I did a decent amount of XC was when I got in the army but it certainly wasn't competitively structured. Lots of pulling really heavy sleds behind you, for multiple hours, across the barren wastelands above the Arctic Circle for weeks at a time - not exactly competitive.

My sole claim to biathlon fame was an oddball long distance ski and shoot I did in Norway while training there for a month with the Norwegian army. As the event unfolded I was right on the Norwegian champs heels, closing a significant amount of distance in the final 15mins, not what the locals expected. The Canadian contingent was going crazy as I came up on the finish line so close that it came down to the shoot at the finish line. I got handed a Norwegian G3 7.62mm rifle I'd never held before, I jumped straight down into the prone position, slammed a 20 round magazine in, cocked the weapon, lined up the metal sights and proceeded to squeeze the trigger. More on that in a sec...



I was always a good shot, from the time I got my first long barrel in my early teens right through to shooting all kinds of distances and all kinds of stuff at an international level in my 20's and early 30's. I had the shooting ability and I think if I would have had the trg and opportunity on skis I might have done ok at biathlon. As I was daydreaming about what could have been and what the boys might do, the National team was out on the course at the same time as us and they were ripping up the laps. It was really impressive to watch, fantastic athletes, as I watched them I had a bit of regret that I never got to give that a go when I was a young fella.

So, back to the Norwegian G3 assault rifle... as I lay there in the snow I did the best I could with an unknown weapon, racing the clock to shoot faster than the Norwegian next to me but at the same time outscore him on the paper target. It turns out we finished shooting right about the same time but he out-pointed me on the target, not by much but enough to get the win. I was pretty happy to get a Norwegian medal from the Commanding Officer who said in broken English "these are quite rare for foreigners". All I could think of at the time was "Cool I got a medal, and WOW that was a hard race". That evening I drank schnapps with the Norwegian winner and never gave biathlon another thought.



What's the point of all this... nothing deep really, other than as I look back through time I see the possibilities that laid out in front of me and biathlon could have been a good choice but I didn't see it as a choice at the time. Looking into the future for the boys Doreen has made a good decision choosing XC as the family winter sport, if they never become competitive in it they will still get a healthy respect for the outdoors and a fitness based lifestyle. But since there is a streak of competitiveness floating around in Doreen or I (mostly Doreen I think ;-) who knows, maybe the boys will get my shooting eye and 15yrs from now one or both of them will be doing laps around the course with the national team? Life's a funny thing. You read it here first. ;-)

That's right, it's a dance-off. Honestly I don't know where this stuff comes from.

The second vid is so funny, keep your eyes glued to Keegan in the background, soooooo funny.

The lighting on this one is a bit odd.

I didn't use any flash, the sunlight was coming through the kitchen window after bouncing off another reflective surface, it then hit the chrome milk jug I poured the latte art with and the light bouncing off the milk jug lit up Keegan's face. Cool.

It was Evan's b-day this weekend. He got to spend it with his school pals at Let's Play. Lots of kids, lots of pizza, lots of cake, lots of fun. It turns out one of his good friends in his class has the exact same b-day, so they shared the cake spotlight. Funny.

Here's Dawson and Evan in mid-laugh, what a couple of jokers.



When they weren't laughing at each other they were telling stories.



Or eating.



Or eyeballing what everyone else was doing.



After pizza it was time to burn off more energy and have more fun.









The kids had a great time.

Keegan jumped up in the air and pumped his fist more times than I could count.

Watching kids run around a four level jungle-gym/play structure is sure to cause a laugh or two.

Time flies by... of course everyone says it will, you know it does, but it's times like this weekend when you see the concrete evidence as your six year old blows out six candles.

Hard to believe Evan is six years old.

Seven will be here in a blink of an eye.

Sweet singletrack goodness. I'm already excited about this one!

On the YMCA spin bike for 40mins out of the saddle looks like this. I know the image isn't the best but that's what a shaky iPhone shot looks like. ;-)

I had some insane techno tunes blasting via the iPhone which helped cause a large biohazard to form in a 180 degree perimeter around the front of the bike.

Blurry vision, drool and sweat = awesome. I got 80mins on the bike this morning and some quick core and stretching. When I left the Y I was a bit wobbly. Nice!

I pulled it together in the parking lot and headed of to go pick up the boys from school.

Good times.

Shooting into the sun on a bright day causes havoc with images, with the SB-900 on it's BL setting the i-TTL mode takes care of business while still leaving room for creativity on how I want the end results to look. Without a flash these images would be dull and lifeless, with the subject dark and washed out and the background blown out. It's unfortunate this kind of shooting isn't better understood by mainstream camera-owners, I see lots of parents shooting their kids with the little pop-up flash on an expensive camera and I know they aren't getting good images given the shooting conditions. Too bad nobody has taken the time to explain to them how lighting can make a huge difference.



Nobody taught me how to use light, I've just done a ton of reading on sites like Strobist and the Nikon CLS forums and such. Reading only takes you so far though, eventually you have to start experimenting. I look for lighting challenges to solve, the harder the lighting problem the more I learn. I do ok sometimes, most of the time I realize how little I know and how many compromises I have to make in order to get close to what I want out of an image. I enjoy the journey more than the results so it's all time well spent. This image below is a good example of a lighting challenge where I had to choose a compromise, I shot Keegan speeding down a slide at the school playground with the sun directly behind him. Balancing shutter speed against aperture which gets balanced against lighting, in this case I had to take a compromise, showing a tiny bit of motion blur from his movement down the slide. I could have notched up the shutter speed to freeze him but then I would have taken a hit on the lighting or aperture. The image turned out pretty good, not great, just good. And that's the fun part, deciding in real time where to take the hit by making the best compromise for the result I'm chasing.



Another good example, shooting below Evan while he was swinging across the monkey bars which had me shooting up into the bright sky. In this case I managed to freeze him, get decent depth of field and still illuminate his face enough via the flash that it all kind of comes together.



Of course anyone who checks into the blog on occasion knows my main interests lie in dramatic light or non-typical shots, a lot of that stuff occurs indoors. This image of Evan down in the basement this morning was shot with the SB-900 remoted and triggered by the D200 in Commander mode. The flash was off to his side and on the floor pointing away from him with the flash head firing at a white door and bouncing the light back at him. Is it technically perfect, not really but I like the lighting and I like it's flaws.

I could have filled in the image some more with the SB-600 off on the other side or coming in at an angle from behind or high-behind but that's not the look I was interested in at the time. Tomorrow I might be chasing that, but that's for tomorrow.

Probably my favorite part of this image is the un-posed nature of Evan. Normally in these kinds of semi-portraits I will get him to smile or at least be part of the shot but in this case I waited until he was thinking about something else, preferring to catch him in his real time presence rather than something I was influencing with the camera. To my eye it is a perfect capture of the moment even with it's technical flaws. Flash geekery 101 done for the day, if you want to see the best tasting 4oz latte I've had in months (from this morning) go over here.

The night time ritual, pajamas and Doreen reading a bedtime story.

I shot some high speed macro yesterday. Three larger images sit over here.

Neither subject is related in anyway, I'm just too lazy to create two posts.

With Halloween coming up fast, last night we carved the pumpkins. Both boys got to pull scary faces so I could copy them on to their pumpkins. It was pretty funny watching them try to pull mean and scary faces. I think they are still a few years away from scary. Here's Evan's pumpkin.



While we had the lights off, I thought I would get creative with the flash and this is what I came up with. OOooooooooo, scary.



Evan's school had their Halloween costume party yesterday and Keegan had his today. Keegan was pumped about the candy he brought back, in this image he seemed super excited about the skeleton ring but that only lasted for 10 seconds then it was back to being excited about the candy. ;-)



After school I was downstairs getting the boys to clean up their mess and figured I would blast off some images of the fish we have in the fish tank. It's a 90 gallon tank and right now we have just over 20 fish. Here's what we have in there...

Bronze Cory cat and Golden Barb



Rainbowfish and Zebra Danio



Moonlight Gourami and Gold Gourami



Well, that concludes the biology lesson for the day, aren't you glad you dropped by.

It speaks for itself.

My Nikon SB-600 Speedlight has been having some issues. I've had it for over 3yrs and it's served me well but recently it has been randomly firing off flashes without me touching anything on the camera. It might be the flash mount that has become so loose the contacts are acting up, whatever the case it's been distracting and concerning for a while but it was particularly annoying when I was taking shots of the boys playing indoor soccer on the weekend. Standing on the sidelines with my flash blasting off for no apparent reason is enough to get stinkeye from other parents.

I use flash quite often. I can't imagine shooting without it. Since the weekend I've poured man hours into a solution to replace the SB-600, there's a bunch of ways to go regarding light but to make a long story short I went with the Nikon SB-900 Speedlight. It will offer me some advantages over the SB-600 both on and off the camera and I'll make the SB-600 a fill flash for as long as it lasts. I can fire the SB-600 with the SB-900 acting as the trigger on camera, or I can fire them both off camera using the D-200 popup.

I haven't used the SB-900 for much yet, I just shot some of the boys and some static stuff. So far I'm really impressed with what I see.



There's going to be a bit of a learning curve with the SB-900 so expect some weird lighting experiments while I see how far I can push it around. I've already started to experiment with the new setup, exploring the 'weird' side of things. I love this kind of stuff but I know it's not everyone's cup o' tea, so bear with me as I post the weird from time to time.

The next two images were taken with the 600 and 900 off camera, both firing along the table at different angles and power settings. I took quite a few shots to see what worked and what didn't. After the first couple of shots I made it a goal to try and light up the little rubber toys so they appeared to be glowing internally. I think the results turned out pretty well considering it was my first bit of experimentation.

Just in time for Halloween.



Glowing rubber toys. Ghoulishly fun. ;-)

I've been playing with macro flash photography for quite a while, it's a lot of fun. Kind of combining two passions at once, I mean I love a good espresso in small milk and I love catching new things in my lens.

I shot this one using the Nikon 105mm macro lens at 1/8000 and F/14 with the SB-600 in Commander mode approx 12 inches away and pointing directly into the cup on a 45 degree angle with the flash manually set at 85mm.