BMX Bandits

So last weekend I went to have a nose at the BMX Flatland contest called Flatground 2006. I wanted to watch these balance nutts and try to capture their fast movements on my new camera. Not heard of the BMX flatland discipline? Well checkout the video of last years final here.

It was a cool, literally freezing, setup in an old warehouse North of the city. It took Betty and I a short ferry journey to get there but it was a pretty sweet setup and a nice scene of people when we arrived. I heard the sound system pounding the beats from a good fair way away so it was easy to find!

There was two main floors, made of chipboard. This is the warm up area where loadsa people were all practising together.






The main arena had the judges, a DJ and all the spectator seating ->




At first I had the camera in automatic "sports" mode but again it was crap as you can see here.


But I do like how this blurred shot came out! ->









So I upped the shutter speed and shots started coming out a bit sharper like this one.




But what surprised me more was the power of the flash. I never bothered using it in the beginning cos I was a fair distance from the riders and thought it would just look crap! But it made quite a bit of difference as you can see in my collection of favourite photos below. Look closely at the Japs who were really good at adding bunny hops into there sessions, the photo where I managed to just get the guy before he fell off and the picture where the guy appears to be pedalling the bike upside down!




Worthy of a special note was this dude who got the loudest cheer from the crowd and was they only guy to do this trick - Awesome. He wobbled off the first time but the second time he nailed it, all the way across the floor and then jumped back down into the saddle - Class!


Then the final mention goes to this young whipper snapper, think he was only 18 but on Saturday during the qualifiers, he was the only dude to do a whole run without putting a foot down. Fair play!


I never returned on Sunday to see the finals which was a shame as I heard there was going to be two riders going head to head to "battle" off the 1st place position. But as you'll read in my next post, there was a reason I did not make it very far from home on Sunday! But I managed to get over 300 shots on just the one day so I think that's enough! I've whittled it down a bit for a slideshow but I'll upload that at another time.