P.O.D.

For those of you who don't keep up with mountain biking, Pinkbike.com is the industry's leading news, photo, and video online source. I upload photos to Pinkbike occasionally just to keep in the scene and see which of my photos people like the most. Pinkbike awards P.O.D., or Picture of the Day, to photographers and riders who put together a good picture. I'm still not sure how it's picked, but alot of it has to do with viewer comments. I've had POD a few times now, but today was a bit different, since today's photo is the first one I've uploaded that has not received any negative comments (as of this morning). Although it's an online award with no prize or money, it's still pretty cool to me since there are alot of great photographers contributing, and it helps to get my name out there. To give you an idea of the popularity of the website, the photo was posted as POD at midnight, and at noon today, a 12-hour span, it has been viewed 16,000 times, each time from a different computer. That's a serious website.

The photo is my buddy Joel in Squamish, BC, Canada. It's in my portfolio because it's one of my favorite shots from last year. I got really lucky with the sun in this pic. It was planned, but the timing was totally luck for the position of the sun. I mean, no one, no one, can shoot a single frame and nail that down without luck. Joel is travelling at supersonic speed if you can't tell by the dust cloud. I only had a single frame to shoot since it was shot with a flash. Perhaps with 'spray and pray' technique where the photographer just holds down the shutter and hopes for the best at 10 frames per second it would be a more likely capture, but I only had one click. Luck.