the irregular blether

I had my first motorsport image published in a magazine, Autosport, in 1993.  I think it was probably 1995 or ’96 that I photographed my first motorcycle race at Knockhill, and in 1998 I started working for Castrol, shooting the British Supersport Championship.  The rest, they say, is history.

In all that time working in the motorcycle industry, I never owned a motorcycle until a few years ago.  There is no one single reason but it was mainly being unable to justify the expense when I was never at home to ride it.  For the best part of 10 years I covered WorldSBK and British Superbike championships and then for three years it was WorldSBK and MotoGP.  I think one year I was out of the country 36 weekends of the 52.  When I was home I mainly just wanted to sit on the sofa that I had paid for but never really got acquainted with.

A few years ago, when Ruairidh was reaching 16, I decided it was time to get myself organized and get him riding as well.  I managed to pick up a couple of Kawasaki KLX125s from the offroad riding school that Kawasaki UK use and we had a few days riding off road to get him up to speed.  

I was made aware of a Kawasaki J125 maxi scooter that was available at a discounted price and I got that organized through J & L Motorcycles in Carlisle and there started the Adventures of the Urban Ninja.  

For a big 125 scooter I was really surprised how well it goes.  It is the ideal tool for the city commute when I have to do it.  Living on the south side of Glasgow means I have a couple of options to get into the city centre and the J125 is equally as happy dodging in and out of traffic through the suburbs or cruising on the M77 urban motorway.  It has become a cool dad taxi as well.  RB has struggled with many aspects of his rider training and with his numerous cycling competitions we decided to throttle back a little and allow him to concentrate on training and racing on the push bike.  In any case, why does he need to get his licence when dad can turn up and ferry him around.

The question of what bike to buy was always going to be a big one. Long time friend and former editor of Superbike magazine, Kenny Pryde, had moved from Surrey to Glasgow and had picked up a used, but immaculate, Kawasaki Versys 650.  He and I had used one for covering the 2012 British Cycling Road Race Championships and he was very impressed with it.  He reckoned I couldn’t go wrong with getting one myself. So in early spring I started the search.

Working for Kawasaki in WorldSBK meant that I had a direct line to make enquiries and I am glad I did.  Picking up a used one was proving difficult.  There are plenty out there but they hold their money really well and when comparing a year old one with a few thousand miles on the clock, there wasn’t a big difference from buying new.  The 2018 range included the Covert Green colourway, a matte olive green, that took my fancy but they too were like hen’s teeth.  Using my lines of communication within Kawasaki we managed to source one and it was duly dispatched to my nearest dealer in Kirkcaldy. By this time it was May and the WorldSBK season was in full swing so it was late June before I had time to pick it up. Since then I have only managed a few short trips the get it run in but I now have a couple of weeks at home before the next WorldSBK race in Portugal and I am looking forward to getting out and exploring.

This week I managed the first proper ride, south from East Kilbride and into the Lowther Hills.  Ruairidh had a rare day off work and I decided to treat him to lunch at the Buccleuch Arms Hotel in Moffat.  It’s run by the Smith family and I had met Clint a few years ago whilst on a road test with RiDE Magazine.  I was back again last year on another road test, this time with Fast Bikes and as a motorcycling family they have built a business that caters perfectly for those travelling on two wheels.  I laughed the last time we spoke when the said they weren’t keen on hosting groups of golfers at the hotel as they caused more trouble than a group of bikers.

The weather was pretty grey and overcast, and really blustery, but it was dry and not at all cold so we set off mid morning and headed south from the town centre on the A726 to Strathaven.  This road is always pretty busy with traffic and also exposed to that harsh south westerly, so it was a steady start to the ride but in less than 10 miles we were onto the B743 heading for Muirkirk.  I ride this road regularly on my push bike and on a Sunday morning it can generally be just me, other cyclists and motorbikes on the road. It is a popular route for two wheels. It’s quite testing as well with a couple of sections of proper snaking tarmac that constantly changes direction. Picking the right lines is essential for making good progress.  A right turn in Muirkirk and on to the A70 brings up a wide, open, sweeping ride down to Cumnock.  Surprsingly this road is always relatively quiet so it’s a chance to push on and enjoy the fast flowing bends and the surprisingly good road surface.

With a bit of navigation through the small ex-mining town of Cumnock we headed south on the A76.  This is a main trunk road that connects Dumfires in the south with Kilmarnock in the west of Scotland so traffic can be a bit heavier.  Luckily for us, in that late morning lull, it was fairly quiet.  The route we were on was taking up the Mennock Pass on the B797 to the mining villages of Wanlockhead and Leadhills. The area was renowned for centuries for its gold, silver and lead deposits but the industry has long since gone and the villages now vie for the accolade of being the highest in Scotland.

We stopped near the top for some photographs.  I have shot a few road tests here before as the landscape offers nice twisting roads carving their way through the heather clad hills. Bizarrely the hillsides are now peppered with beehives and there is always the hazard of the local ovine population wandering aimlessly across the road but today they were all pretty well behaved.

It’s a nice ride, on good roads, from Leadhills to Moffat via the B7040 and B7076.  The latter of which used to form the northbound carriageway of the A74 trunk road. When the M74 motorway was built in the late 1990’s this section of road was downgraded and now includes a cycle path as part of the national cycling network.  The road, however, was obviously designed for speeds up to 70 mph as a former dual carriageway, so it is open and flowing and in no time we are in Moffat and ready for that lunch.

Suitably fed and water it was time to head home.   We retraced our steps back to the junction of the B7040 before continuing north, briefly joining the A702 through Abington, and onto the B7078, crossing the A70 further east of where we picked it up earlier in the day, and then on past Lesmahagow, all the while following the route of the former A74.

We are not far from home now and a quick blast along the B7086 takes us back to Strathaven where we met up with the A726 again.  The overall route was just shy of 140 miles and on the Versys 650, covered on one tank of fuel, especially at my relatively sedate pace. The route we followed has pretty much everything I wanted from the day; some wide sweeping A roads to narrower, sinewy B roads, great scenery and a perfect lunch stop.

When I was at school I studied photography through the Physics and Chemistry departments.  It was as much about the science of creating a photographic image as it was about the creativity of the art.  In capturing the image it was a lesson in light and shade and how the elements of the lens work to create a sharp, well exposed photograph.   The chemistry side came when processing the film and printing the images, alongside learning how to make gin.  Ah, growing up in the 80′s wasn’t all bad.  

Whilst those lessons have stayed with me till today, I should point out for legal reasons that I now buy my gin, I am still learning and trying to make my photography better, but a lot of that is now on the creativity side.  In my main field of work I have seen a lot of motorcycles going round corners and I am now rarely inspired by the images I see on Instsgram, Facebook and other digital platforms where most of the output is published, with most just imitating and copying.  I find myself falling into that mould as well at times and find it extremely frustrating.  

It was interesting therefore to be given the opportunity to try something new at the recent WorldSBK test at the Autodromo do Algarve near Portimao in Portugal.  Could this old dog learn a couple of new tricks?

After I had some of my equipment stolen from the press office in Misano, most probably by someone with media accreditation, I had the task of getting it replaced.  The insurance process was arduous to say the least and it took six weeks to get it all resolved.  As I wrote previously I have to give a big shout out to Nikon Italia and Nikon EU for all the help and support through this period.  

When I was discussing the matter in the Glasgow branch of Wex Photo and Video (or Calumet as I still like to call them) it was suggested that if I was replacing my kit I might want to try the Fuji system with the X-H1 body, a mirrorless camera system.  I currently use a Fuji GFX50S for studio and commercial work but I had never considered the Fujifilm system for action work. So, after a long chat with John from Fuji UK, I set off to Portimao with a Fujifilm X-H1 body and grip and their Fujinon 100mm – 400mm f/4-f/5.6 zoom lens.

Let’s go back to the beginning however.  I started my professional career with a Nikon F4 and manual focus lenses.  In 1999 I traded them up for a Canon EOS system, the best autofocus system at the time, and I was a Canon user until 2011, when I swapped back to Nikon.  I made the transition from shooting film to digital photography at the start of the 2000’s with a Kodak DCS520, effectively a Canon EOS 1n with a digital back attached. If I remember rightly it had a 1.2 megapixel sensor, shot at 3 frames per second, in a burst, that then took over a second to write to the memory card.  I am now using a Nikon D5 for all my main work but the main thing that links everything back to that F4 is that all the cameras were SLR (Single Lens Reflex) with TTL (Through The Lens) viewing.  Light enters the lens, is reflected off a series of mirrors into the viewfinder and when you press the shutter release button, the mirrors moved out of the way and a mechanical shutter opened, exposing the film plate or image senor.  In modern cameras this is done at up to 11 frames per second which, when you consider all that is going on, is a phenomenal feat of design and engineering.

pic:  www.workingdaddy.co.uk

The current trend in the photography industry is for mirrorless cameras.  In technical terms that means there is no mirror in front of the shutter for viewing the scene and is a similar design to a video camera where it is viewed on an electronic view finder (EVF), effectively a small TV screen.

pic: thesunnystha.wordpress.com

This is the first thing I noticed when I started using the Fuji back to back with my Nikon D5.

When you view the scene on an SLR camera you are more or less seeing the actual scene, albeit reflected in the mirrors. With a mirrorless camera you are looking at an EVF, as I said, a small TV screen.  When you fire the shutter the screen goes off and comes back on again.  No matter how hard I tried I found it difficult to keep up with the action looking through the lens.  In terms of what I was used to, the image I was seeing in the EVF didn’t keep up with what was in front of me.  I therefore missed a lot of shots and found myself getting frustrated very easily.

The other noticeable difference is that all the settings for the Autofocus (AF) are controlled electronically, and there are dozens of options.  Uncharacteristically I had read the manual (RTFM) on the plane on the way over and had gone with the custom settings for wide area focus and the fastest active tracking for moving subjects.  To my eye the AF was keeping up, but later detailed inspection of the images showed it hadn’t quite hit the mark.

Anyone who shoots motorcycle racing, and shoots it well, will understand that it is a fairly unique subject to photograph.  Camera manufacturers often use motorsport as an example of their camera’s performance, Fuji are no exception, but they tend to use car photography and this is different in a few subtle but unique ways to motorcycle racing.  Firstly the subject area is less than half the size, the surface area is never flat and as the rider comes towards you, decelerating, they lean the bike into the corner which means that as the subject is moving towards you part of it is also moving away from you, and across the frame.  My feeling was that the wide area focus system on the Fuji, which predicts and chooses the best area for the AF to pinpoint, and is continually changing, meant the movement of the bike was not being picked up correctly by the camera.

With the first day’s shooting in the bag I was a little disappointed with the results so I dropped a quick email to John to confirm that the setting I had chosen were suitable. I had another browse through the extensive manual and came up with a couple of ideas for the following day.  I should point out that in the manual it does say that optimal AF performance may not be achieved with bright reflective surfaces; a highly polished motorcycle fairing in blisteringly bright sunshine?

For day two I chose to change the shutter from mechanical to electronic.  With modern digital cameras the image sensor is always exposed to allow ‘Live View’ viewing on the large screen on the camera back.  With a mechanical shutter, the curtain first covers the sensor, then exposes it before covering it back up again, and then opening for Live View.  An electronic shutter eliminates the moving parts and the image is written across the sensor surface in lines of code in around 1/15thof a second.  The other change I made was to go from wide area focus to single point on the AF.

I also looked at alternative locations for shooting.  My first locations had been on a couple of slower corners, both on the outside and inside of the bend.  With the dynamic movement of the bikes I felt the camera was struggling a bit, so I changed my view to one of a more side panning shot, again both on the outside and inside of the track.  This meant that the bikes were moving across the field of vision at the same distance and in a more or less predictable manner.  Right away my hit rate improved.  The response time of the screen was much better with the electronic shutter as it didn’t have to switch off as the mechanical shutter operated. There was a mere blink, I guess a 1/15thof a second, which meant I could pick up and track the bike as I was shooting a burst.  Added to this the single point AF worked better, I think because there was less going on with the mechanics of the shutter and also only picking up one focus point as opposed to multiple, changing points.  I was much happier with the results I was getting now and was more than happy to send some of these images to my clients.

Which brings me really to my overall impression, not only of the Fuji X-H1 system I was using but also of mirrorless cameras for my field of work.

The handling and ergonomics of the Fuji are very nice.  I like the dials and buttons it has, giving it a traditional feel, but it also makes some of the functions much simpler to use.  There, however, is something I personally find difficult with the modern mirrorless digital camera trend.  There are still to many variables for my liking.  I still own and use a couple of completely manual film cameras; Hasselblad and Rolleiflex and generally I can pick up any mechanical camera and work out right away how to load a roll of film and start shooting, and hopefully get good results.  This is more or less the same with the current crop of DSLR digital cameras. With this Fuji system, and I guess it is the same with most mirrorless systems, there was so much to learn and understand before I went out to shoot something.   I felt that the camera was trying to second guess me all the time; working out what it thought I wanted to shoot as opposed to shooting what I had asked it to shoot.  When I made things a little simpler and cut out some of the variables it seemed to work a little better for me.

One other thing I think is unfair to compare is the lens.  Fuji’s only offering for my type of work is the 100-400mm f/4-f/5.6.  You only have to look at it to realize that there will be a difference in quality when pitted against the 600mm f/4 prime lens from Nikon. That said when it did work the detail in the Fuji images were comparable with those from the Nikon.

I have to go back to the point that shooting motorcycle racing is a little unique.  Add that to the fact that I have been working in a certain way for 20 years or so, picking up an entirely new camera system and getting used to it was always going to be like turning an oil tanker at full speed. Given that I had to shoot for a couple of clients at this test, and deliver the usual quantity and quality of content, I worked mainly with my Nikon D5 and 600mm f/4 lens.   Fingers crossed they were happy with what I supplied but one tech savvy client did ask if I was trying out some new kit as on the first day they noticed a difference in the image quality.  The images were fine for the lo-resolution world of social media but would not be usable for any form of medium to large scale print, such as the 4m x 4m panels they have just had hung in their workshop.

The Suzuka 8Hr race is a ‘bucket list’ race for many motorcycle racing fans as well as the riders.  It is probably one of the most important races for the four main Japanese motorcycle manufacturers.  They expend a large amount of time and resources trying to win the iconic event.  It doesn’t quite have the importance it once had when it attracted all of the world’s best racers and hundreds of thousands of over exuberant Japanese fans. Nonetheless, the manufactures still put a huge amount of effort into this one race.

It is also an event that a huge number of specialist racing photographers want to cover at least once in their career.  I am no different and was lucky enough to have done so at what could be seen as the last hurrah of the glory days.  I travelled to Japan to cover the race for Castrol Honda when they had global superstar, Valentino Rossi in their team. However, times have changed and for various reasons I never got to go back.

When one of my current client’s, Kawasaki, called and asked me to cover the event for them this year, I jumped at the chance. Kawasaki is currently the dominant team in the FIM Superbike World Championship, where I earn my bread and butter. Their current superstar is a reigning and three-time world champion, Jonathan Rea.  Rea had actually won the Suzuka 8Hr in 2012 when he was racing for Honda but this year Kawasaki included him in the official Team Green entry to try and break the stranglehold that Yamaha currently have on the event, winners for the last three consecutive years.

As with all these jobs, and being a freelance contractor, the journey starts with making all of the travel arrangements. With a little help from colleagues in Japan, flights, rental car and hotel were all sorted and it was just a matter of counting down the days before I went.

Just over one week before the event a light fingered interloper threw a spanner in the works however.

Whilst covering a round of the WorldSBK championship at Misano in Italy, I had a substantial amount of kit stolen from within the Media Centre at the circuit.   I lost three lenses, including the 600mm f.4, my stock lens for working on track.  I was not the only victim that day and the issue of someone entering a secure area, either with or without a media credential, to steal equipment, is still being debated.

Thankfully NPS came to my rescue.  The team from Nikon Italia was at the circuit providing the NPS service and they were able to help me out with some loan equipment to complete the job on the weekend.  However, I was in trouble to carry out my next two jobs, a shoot with Yamaha in Barcelona immediately after the Misano event and of course the assignment in Japan the week after.  Again Nikon came to my rescue, whilst the sands of time in the world of insurance run with little viscosity, Nikon UK arranged to have loan equipment shipped to my home address for me to take to Japan.  

I travelled from Edinburgh to Nagoya, an hour or so from Suzuka, via Helsinki.  The flight itself was a bizarre experience.  It was an overnight flight but travelling through the Arctic Circle, across Siberia meant that it never got dark outside.  The sun skirted the horizon on the port side of the plane whilst on my starboard side there was a lovely view of the moon, again just above the horizon.

The southern half of the main Honshu island of Japan is always warm and humid at this time of the year but, like Europe, the Japanese were experiencing a heat wave and when I landed the temperature was 36˚C at 10:00am.  Working in that temperature is incredibly hard and more so at Suzuka where motorized transport around the circuit service road is not allowed.  You have to walk with all your equipment and in those conditions it is thoroughly exhausting.

My brief for this event was two fold.  The first, main, and obvious one was to capture the event, both the on-track action and also the essence of the event.  The additional part of the brief was to deliver a small package of images regularly throughout each of the four days of the event for social media posts.  

As I have mentioned it had been a few years since I had been at the circuit so in the beginning I had to ‘learn’ it again.  It is essential to find all the access points from the media centre and paddock to the trackside. There was also a shuttle bus that would run on track between each session to ferry photographers to the far reaches of the track that were inaccessible by foot.  Working that out pretty much took up the whole afternoon on Wednesday and by the first track session on Thursday morning I had the beginnings of a plan for the weekend.  

That plan started to fall apart when I missed the shuttle bus on Thursday afternoon.  I ended up shooting a section of track I hadn’t recced the previous day and I couldn’t really get anything to work.

To cover an event like this there are a set number of stock pictures you have to capture.  These are mainly shots of the bikes, cranked over in a corner with all the sponsors’ logos on the bike and the rider’s leathers clear and visible. This is pretty standard stuff and after 20 years of doing this work I don’t like to dwell too long on getting these shots.  They can be quite dull to my mind and I like to look for shots that are a bit more dynamic, that capture more of the speed and essence of the sport and also tells the story of where the event is taking place.

It wasn’t until Friday morning that I was back on plan, getting the trackside and pit lane shots, and delivering four or five image packages throughout the day.

The 8hr race takes place mainly in the day but the final hour runs past sunset and into total darkness by the time the chequered flag drops.  For that reason there is an hour of night practice for the competitors on Friday evening. I have shot the MotoGP and Superbike races under floodlights in Qatar, and in the dim and distant past I worked on the local daily newspaper shooting football, so I have experience of pushing the ISO on film and digitally.  The beauty of the modern digital DSLR is the ability to shoot at previously unknown latitudes and produce sharp, useable images.  For this session I was using the 600mm f4 lens and an ISO of 2000. Working at 1/320that f4 still rendered the images very dark but it was important to show that it was nighttime.  I also shoot RAW files all the time and use the Camera Raw plug in for Photoshop to edit the pictures.  It is possibly not the most efficient workflow but I find it gives me the greatest control in postproduction.  It was perfect for these night shots as I could bring up the exposure and the shadow detail a little and still retain a crisp sharp image without too much image grain or noise.

The main challenge of shooting at night was the combat between the camera’s autofocus system and the headlights of the race bikes. When I was last at the event I was shooting Fuji Provia transparency film and the motorbikes had halogen headlights. I don’t recall there being such a battle but with the advent of modern, super bright LED lighting, every time a bike passed the headlights shone straight down the barrel of the lens and bamboozled the autofocus system.  It took a little while to concentrate on pinning the AF sensor on a section of bodywork to the side of the lights and hope it worked.  No mean feat in total darkness, with a bike travelling in excess of 160kph, and the clock ticking down to the end of the session.

In the end I was relatively happy with what I captured but there were a couple of things I missed so I will need to hope for the same assignment next year to work them out.

As the weekend rolled nearer the weather started to break and a typhoon warning was issued on Friday evening for the Mie Prefecture of Japan where the Suzuka circuit is located.  Typhoon Jongdari was the 12thof the season in Japan and previous ones had brought severe flooding and wind damage, and sadly loss of life.  It is something to be taken seriously and as a result all the schedule activities in the public area on Saturday and Sunday were cancelled.  The trade exhibitions were all dismantled which left the circuit with the feel of a ghost town come Saturday evening.  

The typhoon passed through during the night on Saturday, waking me up at 1:00 am with incredible wind and rain for over 2 hours. I am sure at 10 stories up in my hotel I felt a little swaying back and forth.  It passed through relatively quickly with little or no effect on the city but it did leave behind a trail of sunshine and showers in its wake that would play a huge part in deciding the outcome of the race.

To have eight hours to shoot an event seems like a luxury but every hour I had to make and deliver a picture selection and time seemed to pass quickly.  Kawasaki had a torrid time.  From claiming pole position on Saturday their bike almost ran out of fuel with Jonathan Rea being fortunate enough to coast into the pit lane for a pit stop and rider change.  His teammate Leon Haslam took over for an hour and began to claw back the time but when Rea took over again the heavens opened.  The safety car came out but he was on slick tyres and unfortunately crashed on the treacherous surface.  

Like the rider, I rushed back to the pit box as fast as I could to capture the mechanics repairing the bike to get them back out and into the race.  It was in this moment of bad fortune that I got the images that told the story of the event for Team Green.  

Kawasaki has always given their race bikes the Ninja moniker, the Ninja ZX-10RR being the current flagship race machine.  They have long used the phrase Ninja Spirit to describe their efforts.  This one moment, with a racer dusting himself down and the mechanics rushing around, removing and replacing parts on the bike encapsulated that Ninja Spirit.  They bike was in the pit box for a matter of minutes and Leon Haslam was once more dispatched into the fray, this time on rain tyres, but the race was ultimately lost.  In the end the Yamaha team ran another faultless race and claimed their fourth win in a row.  Kawasaki finished third.  

Me?  I finished a few kg’s lighter with a sore back and sore feet.  My handy little App told me that I had taken over 20000 steps and walked almost 10 miles within that eight hours.  All the work had been delivered and it only remained to pack the bags and drive back to Nagoya Airport.

For those bicycle racing fans amongst us there is nothing better to watch than a pro cyclist riding flat out, man and machine in perfect harmony. The escapee racing towards the finish line, riding on the drops and turning the pedals with apparent ease, yet travelling at 50 - 60 km/h.  It’s known as souplesse and it’s beautiful to watch.

For the weekend warriors amongst us, every time we throw our leg over the bike and head out around our local lanes, in our head we look the same. We imagine we are clipping alone with ease, like poetry in motion.  The reality, let me tell you, is something far removed.

It all stems from that inner feeling that we want to be little bit ‘pro’. As soon as the daffodils are having a sniff at the air to see if it is worth coming out to play, we are reaching for the Blue II’s and de-fuzzing the winter plumage from our legs.  We all follow the unwritten rules on sock colour and length, what colour armwarmers to wear and so on – well that was until some bloke went and wrote them down and made a career out of telling us to “Harden The F%$k Up” (Rule #5).  Now there are “The Rules”.  A list of edicts that cover everything from bar tape and saddle colour, to how to maintain your tan lines.  All to keep you looking ‘pro’.  

As an aside, I found The Rules amusing in the beginning but now I like to subscribe to Rule#5a “Get A F$%&ing Life”.  I might have made that one up.

There is, however, always one thing missing in all this looking pro game. The bike.  We can be a fully paid up member of the Velominati; we can have a full wardrobe of Team Sky replica kit and wear the same shoes as Chris Froome, but none of us will ride a genuine race bike.  Until now that is.

If you happen to wander down Girona way you will find yourself slap bang in the middle of Pro central.  It is home to dozens of professional cyclists and other athletes and is also where EF Education First Drapac p/b Cannondale - Pro Cycling Team has their base.  There are companies in town that will treat you like a pro; fettle your bike in the evening; massage your legs; take you on group rides; form a short blast to a full on luxury, gourmet week of cycling and eating.  But what of the bike?

That’s where Cannondale come in.  Bike Breaks, one of the cycling businesses in Girona that has by far and away the largest fleet of rental bikes, has taken delivery of range of bikes from the Cannondale Pro Cycling Team for you and me to rent.  A real live pro bike.  One with a name on it; that has ridden 1000’s of kilometres, been in that break chasing a stage win on the Tour de France, or hurtling towards the Velodrome in Roubaix; a bike that has real provenance and sticks two fingers up to The Rules because it has been there, done it and wears what ever t-shirt it wants.

Bike Breaks have a huge fleet of Cannondale Synapse bikes for all sizes and abilities, which can be specced with Di2 groupsets and carbon wheels. However, it is the ex-Pro bikes that are the jewel in the crown.

I had hoped to be riding a SuperSix Evo Hi-Mod but such is their popularity that when I was in town the only one available in my size was a Synapse Disc. It was built for use in last year’s Spring Classics and came with Shimano Di2 and hydraulic disc brakes.  If only I was 190 cm tall I could have ridden one of Sep Vanmarcke’s SuperSix Evo’s.  

Just think about that.  Vanmarcke has been a consistently high finisher in the Spring Classics, a regular on the podium at the likes of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Ghent Wevelgem, Tour of Flanders and more than one top ten finish in Roubaix; and you can ride his bike.  Would anyone ever get the chance to ride Valentino Rossi’s Yamaha or Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes?  Never.

There is no better place in my view to go cycling than Girona and now there is possibility to ride a bike that has come straight from the Cannondale Pro team.  Anyone can truly imagine they are in that break for the stage win, or charging into Roubaix; or in my case being a domestique that has been dropped by the peleton and is struggling to get to the finish within the time cut.  Either way it makes you feel a little bit special, a little bit pro.  

 After a winter of making a GeeBee size dent in my sofa, getting back to real work was a bit of jolt.  Whilst I work in WorldSBK road racing I have hit the road like Tai Wofinden; tapes up, clutch out and go, full gas.

 After the first couple of days with the Red Bull Honda squad at their workshops in Netherlands I had a short hiatus to spend the weekend at home to celebrate my wife’s birthday.  By Monday morning I was fully loaded, and I mean fully, at the airport and heading to Jerez for the last block of winter testing for the Superbike teams before everyone heads to Phillip Island.

 I was joined by Jamie Morris and aside from the standard work of shooting the action at the test, we had an appointment in Seville with the KRT squad to get all their official studio pictures done ahead of their team launch in Barcelona on 8th February.  The team had rented a large studio in the outskirts of Seville that had a full infinity cove and white painted floor.  It had been used to shoot cars in the past which made shooting the bikes much easier as there was plenty of space.  Setting up the lighting was simple and in the end we rattled through the brief in record time.

 I liked the images straight away and there was very little post-production on my part before I delivered them to the team.

 It was then on to Portimao where the focus moved to Yamaha.  

 Vaclav Duska Jnr joined Jamie and I for this job, completing the GeeBee team, and after the initial day of testing we plunged head first into an incredibly full schedule for the next four days.

 Over the course of those days we shot ‘studio’ images of the Pata Yamaha WorldSBK team, the GRT WorldSSP squad and both the GMT 94 and YART EWC teams. On top of that Yamaha Motor Europe presented the updated for 2018 YZF-R1M road machine to the press.  That added photoshoots for the standard R1, the R1M and the GYTR (Genuine Yamaha Technology Racing) machine, an R1M kitted out in race parts, both in our makeshift studio and on the track alongside the race bikes.

 It meant a few days of late nights and early mornings.  I think we had 10 to 12 hours of sleep over the course of three days, which didn’t do anything for the concentration levels. One thing that did surprise me was the sheer volume of content that we produced over the course of the shoot. On Thursday, when the 25 journalists and various Yamaha VIP’s rode the new bikes, we shot around 20,000 RAW images between us.  That is one of the benefits of digital photography, you have little concern for the number of times you hit the button.  There is a danger of adopting a scatter gun approach but the downside is the amount of selecting and editing that has to be done at the other end.

 I was conscious of that when shooting but when the journos had seven, 25 minute sessions it was inevitable we would over shoot in an attempt to give the widest possible variety of images.

 The other thing that was noticeable between all those ‘studio’ jobs was how much easier things were when shooting in a purpose built photography studio as opposed to a workshop or a pit box with white paper backdrops.  In the studio in Seville there was no issue of keeping the floor clean, the owners provided very natty overshoes, and the reflective floor allowed for a lovely flood of light meaning that there was less on an issue with prominent highlights on the high gloss paint finish on the bikes.  The design of the bikes is still under embargo but on one manufacturers bikes it was pretty hard to balance the light and minimize reflections as the finish was divided equally between high gloss paint and matt black carbon.  

 There was no time to catch a breath during the entire shoot and it has meant that beyond the shoot we have spent days selecting and editing everything, with the soul destroying job of retouching the floor for each image to get rid of tyre and footprint marks.  No matter how hard you try it is impossible to keep a white paper floor clean.

 Fingers crossed we are pretty much done and ready to move on to the start of the season.

 The kit is all ready to be packed up and flights are booked and visas sorted to get to Australia.  I have the Kawasaki Racing Team presentation to attend at their workshops in Barcelona this week before everything settles into the usual pattern of the race calendar.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse over the last couple of days and as what was meant to be Storm Fionn headed towards the UK I packed up my bags and set off from home to start the 2018 WorldSBK season.

 The first assignment is at the Ten Kate Racing workshops in the Netherlands to shoot the Red Bull Honda Fireblades, along with riders Leon Camier and Jake Gagne in their 2018 garb.  I was travelling from Edinburgh to Amsterdam in the morning but Police Scotland had advised only essential travel overnight as the south and west of Scotland was expecting another five to ten centimetres of snow.  We already had more than five centimetres at home and the local roads have been chaos.  I therefore decided to leave early and stay overnight at the airport.

So the glamour of life on the road begins again; in the inauspicious surrounding of a Holiday Inn Express next to the runway at Edinburgh Airport.

 I will be back in a day or so but having spent the best part of the last eight weeks at home it is always a real wrench to leave. Next week I will head off again to Jerez and Portimao for the first big WorldSBK tests of the season. It is a real hectic start to the season with a lot crammed into a short period of time.  

 I always find I am strangely torn at this time of the year. The urge to get back to work and be photographing racing motorbikes in the sunshine is incredibly strong.  On the other hand I have become so used to the domestic routine and spending long days and weekends with my family, I don’t want to leave.  I have left a shed-sized hole in my garden alongside a bag of sand and pile of paving slabs.  Bizarrely I will miss my domestic, manual labour.

 The other main problem is re-learning how to pack my bags.  

 Every winter I seem to accumulate some more kit, and every winter I seem to lose something.  I am sure there are some Borrowers in my house that have a load of cables, data cards and chargers stashed away.  I have spent the last few days adding things to various piles as I remember I need this or that, and then the last day before I leave trying to make it all weigh 23kg. Predictably I failed.

 In the end I will get to the airport and then the racetrack and feel that I strangely belong.  I don’t know what I would do otherwise, aside from finishing the work in the garden.  I wrote in OTOR recently that I find it difficult sometimes to keep my work fresh each year given that I go to the same racetracks, with the same teams, and very little changes from one year to the next. There are a couple of new destinations on my calendar this year and a couple of old ones that I haven’t visited for a long time so I am looking forward to that.  I also have a couple of ideas that I have been trying to get to work for a couple of years so I will give it a go again this year and see what I can achieve.

 Over the next three weeks I will be pretty busy with pre-season shoots and testing before heading to Phillip Island for the first round of the Championship.  Hopefully by then I will have found my bag packing mojo and the Borrowers will have returned the Thunderbolt adapter for my Ethernet cable.

 Oh and I left my iPhone charger beside my bed at home.  

It is a bizarre feeling being extremely nervous when you are about to make a presentation to a group of age five to nine year olds.

This year has been one where I have finally got my finger out of my backside and done a few things I should have done years before now.  Since Ruairidh joined Glasgow Riderz Go Ride cycling club seven or eight years ago I have helped out at coaching sessions but always just as a parent helper.  That continued as he progressed through the age groups and on to competing with Special Olympics.

At the latter, being a coach doesn’t necessarily require any form of training or qualification, just a lot of enthusiasm and a passion for getting the most out of the athletes.  However, coaching under the British Cycling umbrella does need formal training and an amount of assessed practical coaching before you can be licensed as a coach.

So, after much procrastination, I took up the cudgels and signed up to the BC Level 2 coaching course that was scheduled to take place in Edinburgh at the end of September.  

Having completed my first two days of tuition I now have 12 weeks to deliver six one hour sessions around a specific theme.  It all sounds pretty simple.  It would be if it wasn't the end of the season and most clubs were ending their coaching sessions for winter.  I also want to concentrate on the Special Olympics Scotland West team where I do most of my coaching.  They only have three session left, one of which I will miss through work.  Thankfully Martin Mulholland at Johnstone Jets has stepped in and allowed me to coach the Small Gears group on a Saturday morning over the next three weeks.

I therefore found myself last Saturday morning facing my toughest ever audience and acutely aware that it could all go horribly wrong.  

Thankfully I survived.  

They were in general a good bunch and worked really hard on their cornering technique.  Hopefully they won't groan too much when I go back again next week.  The Special Olympics bunch all worked well on the previous Wednesday evening and we made a bit of progress with a couple of riders on their own corner skills.  The difference between the two groups is that with the SOSW athletes we will more or less go back over everything we have done previously in the next session as the athletes learn at a slower rate.  At the Jets we will move on and introduce some more technical cornering.  Oh and hopefully find a little bit more mud.

Thank you must go to fellow coaches, Tom, Janis, 2 x Martin, Kenny and Mia for coaching and crowd control assistance and, in particular, their valuable feedback (thanks Martin Mul for the action pics as well).  

I get a huge sense of satisfaction when coaching Special Olympics athletes, as for many the simple activity of riding a bicycle is an achievement.  To see them winning medals in competition is extremely heart warming.  Over the last few years I have also become a bit jaundiced with the development of Junior and U23 age group racers.  There are a lot of competing agendas that are not necessarily compatible with the best interests of the athletes.

I had a real sense when riding yesterday that it was the very last day before winter.  A feeling that I should be gathering acorns; preparing my den; getting ready for a long winter hibernation because tomorrow the snows were going to come.  In reality, living in west central Scotland, winter is characterised by a stream of Atlantic low pressure systems riding the Gulfstream and bringing wind and rain.

It is of course only the beginning of October but summer has definitely left this part of the northern hemisphere.  The air was crisp, there was a light breeze and the sun was low in the sky, even at midday, casting long shadows across the road.  

It’s the time of year when in this part of the world we resort to our ‘winter bike’.  With agricultural vehicles spreading manure across the road from every farm entrance and field drains depositing their detritus across the road, even after a couple of dry days, delicate posh frames and components can soon find the going too much.  The best option is a simple sturdy aluminium frame with as cheap a finishing kit as your vanity will allow, and of course mud guards.

The winter bike phenomenon is however a bit of a misnomer to anyone who lives south of the UK.  When I explain to my friends in Catalunya that I am riding the winter steed they pause and look at me as if I have just landed from Mars.

“Sorry?  I don’t understand.”

“Well you know, an old bike with mudguards. Something to ride when the weather and the roads are a bit shitty.”

“No, no, no.  You just don't ride on those days because tomorrow it will be nice.”

Oh the luxury.  Between work, family and other commitments of daily life - and of course my life as an international man of mystery - if I want to ride my bike from October to March, riding in inclement weather is the only option.  It may be cold and wet but outside is still free, even in winter.

Now comes the ‘but’.

It may be cold and a bit damp at times but I actually enjoy it.  There is a great feeling of well being on a cold day coming home to a hot chocolate, a warm shower and an overarching sense of smugness that you embraced the nonsense that is #rule5.

It’s also a great justification for N+1.  When it is really dank and dreary you can always jump on the gravel bike (previously known as a cycle-cross bike) and head off road.  I live right next to one of Europe’s largest on shore wind farms with over 130km of gravel roads.  It is easy to get lost for 2 - 3 hours on a Saturday morning and not see a car for the whole time.