It’s one thing to capture the speed and intensity of mountain biking on film—but how do you get all that gnarliness to come across in still photography?
For the six photographers who competed in the Crankworx Deep Summer photo challenge, that was the easy part. Each is a seasoned and skilled action sports photographer-- the word “stacked” kept coming up when describing this year’s field of competitors.
The challenge in Deep Summer comes in its grueling format: the photographers and their crews have exactly three days to shoot and edit enough incredible photos to fill a slideshow. Sleep and food become low priority.
Their hard work culminated at the presentation of the slideshows in the Olympic Plaza last night, where despite a touch of rain earlier in the day, the crowds came out in masses.
Duncan Philpott, the first photographer to present, was already a winner—a few months ago, he won the Pinkbike.com contest to fill the sixth and final spot in the competition. His show was set to a Macklemore tune and had an awesome vibe that showed all the sides of mountain biking, from spectacular alpine shredding to urban riding. He did a great job capturing the athletes’ crazy body contortions, something you can’t necessarily appreciate when watching the sport in person since they’re moving so darned fast.
Revelstoke local Bruno Long took the stage next. Prior to the show, he told the audience that he’d had his concept in mind for awhile and felt prepared to finally execute the idea: #instaradification. His show played around with different types of film and photography (for instance, instead of the standard athlete portraits, he assembled Polaroids of all of their body parts—#awesome) and our obsession with our phones and social media. The final result ensured that his show stood out from the rest.
Up third was Harookz, who described the last few days as “Mayhem. Super fun. Lack of sleep. We’re stoked.” And with that began his show, titled “Freedom”. This show had a little bit of everything—a recurring role for a guy in a bear suit, classic animal shots, and some truly outrageous photos where the athletes seemed to be soaring a million feet off the ground. Even after having seen so many photos in a short amount of time, there were a few throughout Harookz show that really stood out to me as exceptional.
Scott Markewitz presented his show, “Shred”, next. To me, the individual photos in this show really had the wow factor. Scott was all about capturing all the intricate natural details, and his photos played with the movement of the sport. There were no gimmicks, just extraordinary photography. And lots of inversions.
I had hear rumblings that Garrett Grove was one to watch this year, even in the fierce field of competitors. His show opened with some epic shots of the Sea to Sky landscape and gradually built to the mountain biking action. There HAD to be a helicopter involved to get some of the beauties he captured. His show was definitely a favourite among the crowd.
Closing the show was Nicholas Teichrob from the Sunshine Coast. He introduced his show by spelling out the theme to us: for him, mountain biking is a way to escape life. He wanted to show the different ways to achieve that feeling. HINT: Photographers, explaining your theme is a good idea—the audience only gets to see your show once and themes aren’t always obvious right away, so stating it beforehand gets us on board immediately. Nick’s show got right into the action, starting with a fast paced song and slide speed, and later mellowing out. I can’t decide if my favourite part was the puppy shots (the dog made an appearance in 15 photos by my count) or the super cool neon sequence.
Apparently the judges loved the puppy and neon, too, because Nick Teichrob took first place! Holding his $5,000 cheque, he thanked his team by saying, “These guys crushed it. I’m stoked!”. Garrett Grove left with a cool $3,000 for his second place finish, and Harookz took third place and $2,000. Each of the six shows held its own and it goes without saying that the bar is set incredibly high for Deep Summer 2013.
