Red Bulls and Scotsmen…
Hot on the heels of yesterday's pessimistic post about the same old same old, I spent the day in the company of four young mentalists on motorbikes in the centre of Glasgow. Red Bull are currently touring a demo team around the UK in promotion of their main X-Fighters event in London, which will be held later this summer, and today it turned up in Glasgow.
Now, for any photographer who has to apply for their own passes, there is one universal truth - if you've realised that you need a pass for an event the next day, it will almost certainly not happen. If you're asking on a Friday, Frosty the Snowman has got a better chance of traversing Hades than you do of getting into the gig/show you want to. But not with Red Bull! After sending off an email that I had abandoned as a failure as soon as I hit 'send' on Friday at 5pm, I missed a call from a helpful guy at Red Bull, telling me that there was no problem, and to call him on his mobile on Saturday (today) morningto sort it out. I nearly fell off my stool at this staggering display of efficiency and helpfulness, so well done to Jamie at Red Bull for being so spot on about it all.
The display itself was actually two shows - one at 2pm, one at 4pm. I've never shot MX before, and given the space constraints, it was bloody hard to shoot - ideally, you'd be high enough up that you could get an idea of where the ground is, without resorting to a wide angle, which makes the riders look absolutely TINY. This wasn't possible. One of the photographers sat up on the ramp for a bit, but the riders weren't mad keen on anyone being there later on due to the wind picking up, so that was a no-go. To be honest, I was just there for the benefit of putting together a nice photo feature for the uni paper, and I got what I was after in that respect, and I as ever, it was good to try out something new.
All the images here are black and white, as I thought I'd have a play around - the colour images are being used in the article I'm putting together, which will be linked to on here when it's done. Please don't consider them in the sense of editorial sports coverage, as I think anyone can see that's not what I was intending when I shot and edited them!
I would say that although I've seen a lot of freestyle MX on TV, it's much, much more entertaining in real life, and if you're able to get to the London X-Fighters event (Google it for more info), then I'd definitely recommend heading along - I get the impression that the four lads there today were just scraping the surface in terms of what's achieved at the big tour events themselves.
