Here we go again!

As I sit here writing this, a rare glimpse of the sun is shining off of the water and into my office. It was fairly dry here on the North Shore, until early January. Since then, mother nature has decided to make up for lost time, dumping large amounts of rain on us, and feet of snow in the mountains.

It's been a great off-season riding dirt and shredding pow, but it's time to get 2012 underway once again. As usual the season is starting off in South America. On February 13th, I hit YVR for the long flight to Santiago, Chile for a 10 days of shooting, riding and hanging out with old friends who laugh at my feeble attempts to speak Spanish. 7 years into this annual trip, you'd think I would have picked some up.

This year should be a good one, albeit with a bit of an odd schedule due to the Olympics. The regular suspects are back for clients - Monster Energy, Specialized, Pinkbike etc.; and I've picked up a couple of new ones. This year will also see me shooting a lot of video on retainer as well. Stay tuned to fiveten.com as they will have weekly video edits up from all of the major races.

This year is also an exciting one on the gear front, for those of you who enjoy that sort of thing. I've been testing out some new tech and it looks super promising. GoPro fired over a couple of the new Hero2 cameras. Besides great POV video you expect from these things, the new ones shoot 11mp stills. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for POV images that are print worthy. So far, testing on bikes and boards has gone super well, so keep an eye open for that. On the full size camera front, I've picked up a new Canon 1D Mark IV while I wait for my 1DX pre-order to ship out (June, apparently.) So while I may be broke, i'll have a shiny new out of the box body to play with!

Another great day out riding on Vancouver's North Shore with MTB legend (and my neighbour) Brett Tippie.

Posted on February 1, 2012 - 11:37 AM