Toonie Race And Gear Test

The snow is finally starting to disappear after another long Canadian winter. Come this time of year all I can think of is mountain biking. I’m like a bear coming out of hibernation on the hunt for food. I am as hungry to ride as I am to photograph riding. After shooting nothing but models in the studio all winter, I hunger for dirt!

This past weekend a local rider, Jeremy Lavigne, held a toonie race. These are popular elsewhere, Whistler for example, but to my knowledge he is the first to attempt them here in Ontario. We have always had “races” for fun like this, but he is the first to try and incorporate some official timing and structure to it. He held one last fall and this is his first this year. Jer is a good guy, a rider! He has been building trails just north of Toronto for a few years – the now famous Shithouse trails. Building trails in Ontario is a whole other ball of wax I won’t get into today, but lets just say he has been one of the more successful guys to attempt this. I think his ultimate success is due to the fact that he has kept it low key and steered clear of massive hucks that scream “lawsuits”.

I headed out on Sunday to meet up with Jer and the racers. I followed the simple directions and found the spot without any trouble. This was my first outdoor shoot with small strobes for the season and I was a bit rusty. I had grown comfortable with the ease of controlling my light indoors. F11 was f11 all day long. I forgot about rolling clouds, tree cover and balancing the ever changing ambient light. If ever the sunny 16 rule applied, it was that day. It was f16 in the shade, and there wasn’t any shade….none. I was going to be asking a lot from my little strobes. The leaves weren’t out yet and the ones that were down from the previous year were a shinny reflective gold. It looked like a forest of telephone poles on an orange carpet.

I was testing a new setup for this shoot. I still can’t quite cough up for a set of Ranger RXs so am still using my small strobes. I did some research into systems that would allow me to trigger two SB800s with one Pocket Wizard. There are quite a few different options out there. The most basic being a simple mono y-adapter from Radio Shack, but from what I have read these aren’t that reliable. I also wanted a nice bracket that would hold two strobes, my PW, a battery pack and possibly have an umbrella mount. There are a few options for this as well and the one I was originally drawn to was the Brewer Bracket. I did in fact try to order the bracket but the small stroboframe coldshoes were out of stock. Todd, the owner, was super helpful and provided top-drawer customer service, even giving me a full refund when I told him I needed to find another solution due to time restraints. I still want to get one of his brackets and highly recommend them based on service alone. I ended up going with a solution from Paramount Cords.

It had several advantages in that it also came with a double strobe y-cable. I never liked the standard PC cord setup and found it wasn’t anywhere near as robust as I needed it to be for outdoor action work. My stands get knocked over a few times a year and are used in less than ideal weather conditions. In a race environment, I am usually packing and unpacking like a mad fool running up and down the hill to find new setups in a hurry. I have bent more than one pin like this. The bracket also offered some added configuration options with it’s third arm and the fact that the the arms rotated. I could now mount my PW or a third strobe if I needed to. The bracket itself didn’t have an umbrella mount but there are ways around that and it wasn’t my top priority. I wanted this setup because I was after an extra stop of light so diffusing it with an umbrella would defeat the purpose. Paramount sells one if I chose to add that option later.

The two areas that disappoint me about this product though are the quality of the build and the tolerance of the hotshoes. The bracket is made of plastic and can barely support the weight of the strobes when extended like this. When you move your stand around the bracket flaps like a birds wings in flight. I don’t think it would take much for these to snap and if it was any colder out, I think they may have. The biggest disappointment though is the tolerance of the hotshoes. They are either too tight, causing the pins of my expensive strobes to scratch the plastic on the hotshoe (potentially damaging the delicate pins on my strobes) or so loose I can’t lock my strobes in place. When I tilted the stand back, my strobes slid out of it. Not good! I don’t think I am going to bother sending them back. If they want to send me some new ones great, but otherwise I think these just need a little cold setting The electrical mechanism worked flawlessly though and the strobes fired without any issues. I had the dual setup as my main light and a separate, third kicker, to light up the riders faces hidden behind a tree. I think I will still try to order a Brewer Bracket for the World Cups. I can’t have my strobe falling out and causing a rider to get injured. The Brewer Bracket is so burly that with a little DIY you can mount 4 strobes to it.

I don’t “love” shooting races simply because unless you are using on-camera flash (yuck) or available light (flat) you end up inadvertently getting trapped in one or two spots. Once you get your setup right you don’t want to move. Unpacking, setting up, packing back up and moving takes a fair bit of time and you miss more shots than it’s worth. It’s also 100% guaranteed that after waiting 1hr for a fast guy to come through, he will the second you pack up. I much prefer shooting dedicated shoots with riders. There were a few rippers here I would like to work with again. In the end it was a successful shoot and it was great to be outdoors shooting what I love. Great job to all the riders involved and to Jer for putting in the time and work to make this happen. The course was buff and fun was had by all. Here are a couple of shots from the race.