When Good Batteries go Bad

This weekend COGGS held a great event at Spirit Mountain in Duluth. The trail is one of the favorites in the series. It is most likely the most challenging course in MN and the downhillers love it!

Since I havent ridden the trail before, I was struggling with locating good places to take photos. Jay Richards was kind enough to give me insight into some nice places for the expert/comp race. In the upper portion of the trail I found some nice sketchy downhills along with a fast descent with good light for a nice classic shot.

The sketchy downhill ended up to be a bad location, they had a mass start which I was unaware of, since the sketchy downhill began immediately after the switchback climbs to the top of the hill, everyone and theirbrother was dipping into the singletrack at the same time. Too many people generally equals lots of walking/running which was the case here. I guess you could say it worked out to my advantage because my flash was acting all goofy and only firing every 3-4 riders. I have determined my rechargable batteries to be the cause of this strange behaviour from my flash. So My first set of photos resulted in dark faced people running down a sketchy hill with their bikes. Needless to say, not the best sports shot of the day. The image

I was envisioning is the second one.

While my flash continued to act goofy for the duration of the day, most of my shots were absoultely spectacular. The obstacles and views from the top of Spirit are amazing.

To be continued.....