Today I present you a little video project I did this weekend with my friend Bastian Weber-Dahlmann. When we got to Squamish we figured out pretty soon, that we wanted to do some mountain biking in the surrounding forests. That’s why buying our own mountain bikes was one of the first things we did. The following video shows us on the “Half Nelson” Trail near Squamish.

British Columbia is not only world famous for amazing skiing and snowboarding opportunities, but also for its pristine mountain bike trails. Getting into mountain biking while waiting for the snow came quite natural to Bastian, so I decided straight away to join him in this fun sport. We both had no previous experience rather then our childhoods on bikes in Germany.

On my first day on the bike, we went to the Whistler Mountain Bike Park and drove the famous A-Line, which prepared us for most of the trails around Squamish to say the least. Wearing plastic garbage bags to protect ourselves from the rain, we soon got known as “The Plastic Guys” and everyone made a big circle around the greenhorns in the bike park.

Back home in Squamish we tried a wide variety of trails around town, ranging from more technical downhill trails to fun jump trails and uphill climbing trails. We soon found a trail that suited us perfectly. The “Half Nelson” Trail is a fun downhill pump track that some people like to compare with the A-Line in Whistler. We drove the trail again and again and the idea for a video was born. After over four weeks of constant rain, Squamish finally got some sunshine this week and we went to film the trail.

It was the first real video shooting for the both of us, but because we enjoy photography a lot it did come quite natural to us. As we wanted to show ourselves driving down the trail, we decided to use stills mostly. Using tripods, we had to shoot every scene separately and walk back up to do the next corner. After 8 hours of filming, we had all the scenes we needed and headed back to Bastian’s place for the editing.

Because I just had iMovie on my Macbook, we kept the editing quite simple. We used hard and fast cuts trying to produce a feeling of an ongoing flow throughout the trail. After another few hours on the computer we were satisfied and realized how refreshing the video format can be for digital photographers. All of our cameras have the ability to produce high-resolution videos these days and with photography as a backbone, getting into movie making is a really fun thing to do!