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Bike

Photo Editor: David Reddick

Art Director: Shaun N. Bernadou

Photographer: Jordan Manley

Note: Content for The Daily Edit is found on the newsstands. Submissions are not accepted.

Heidi: Did you propose this photo essay to the magazine or did they come to you as you are a regular contributor with them?
The images in the essay were actually part of a 3 day photo competition called ” Saint Deep Summer Photo Challenge” that is put on by Saint (Shimano) and the Whistler Bike Park. It is a competition modeled off of Whistler Blackcomb’s “Deep Winter” photo challenge that has been running for the last 5 years – I’ve participated in that winter event 3 times. The idea (for both events) is that 6 invited photographers go out and capture imagery over the period of the same 3 days, with one or more athletes. Then, the teams have to put together a slide show of the images for a crowd of about 700-1000 people in Whistler. A winner is judged by a panel of 5 judges.

Anyways, I’ve participated in a bunch of these kinds of events over the last several years, and always feel that the way to create a strong slideshow is to tell a story, and build a theme with the images – not simply stack together 3-5 minutes of action imagery. Prior to the competition I was thinking about themes that celebrated both the Whistler Bike Park (one of the necessary pieces of criteria) but told a story about people who work there. It occurred to me that the Bike Park trail crew seemed are a group of unsung heroes. Thousands of people rattle down the trails every day from May to October, and the creativity and hard work that the trail crew do to keep smiles on people’s faces largely goes uncelebrated.

Did you spend a full day with the crew?
I spent really only an early morning with the crew, starting at 7am at 711 where they grab their coffee and then drove up through the Bike Park with them and hung around while they did different work on different parts of the mountain. I was there until I think 10am when the park opens for the day.

How much did you shoot and was the edit hard?
I shot quite a bit, but the most time consuming images didn’t end up running in the Bike story. Those were point-of-view ones, where I mounted my camera to the hand tools, and did some digging myself to capture some blurred tools moving through the dirt – those were some of my favourites. Also I strapped a camera on some of the heavy equipment while it articulated. The edit was not too difficult.

I like the hand shot, did that direction come from the magazine? Did they ask you for details and scale shift in the images?
The hand shot if I remember correctly might have been spurred by what one of the guys said to me about his co-worker’s hands. I always try to donate a good chunk of time on any given shoot to the details. I think details can really aid in illuminating something about the larger story that I’m attempting to tell.

So, in short, there was no direction from the magazine. I have done 5-7 assignments for David Reddick who is the photo editor at both Bike Magazine and Powder, and I am a Senior Photographer at both. Most of the time I am assigned stories that I haven’t had part in pitching, though I pitched this essay after the fact to him. I thought the images were relavent since the Whistler Mountain Bike Park is the most famous of it’s kind in the world – it has quickly become a mecca of mechanized mountain biking, and the trail system there is a big part of that success.

What is your riding to shooting ratio?
I think I do a lot more mountain biking than I do shooting mountain biking. Ski photography occupies much more of my time through the year, and my ratio of shooting to skiing is tipped more towards shooting – but saying that, shooting both biking and skiing almost always involve being on the bike or skis to shoot.